Book and Movie Quotes
Don't be a smart ass Ok I'll be a ********
16 Candles
That's why they call them crushes, if they were easy they'd call them something else
16 candles
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
A.J. Muste
When an old man dies, a library burns
African proverb
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision as the limits of the world
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is not true that the heart wears out but the body creates this illusion
Albert Camus
No matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger, something better, pushing right back
Albert Camus
The world is what is is, which is to say, nothing much
Albert Camus
There is no frontier between being and appearing
Albert Camus
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question
Albert Camus
"I have to return some videotapes"
American Psycho
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this to be true
James Branch Cabell
Always that same old story - Father Time and Mother Earth, a marriage on the rocks.
James Merrill
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable
Jane Austen - Emma
It was one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides
Jane Austen - Persuasion
Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians
Charles de Gaulle
The best thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in looks much like home as we can
Christopher Fry
How long will you abuse our patience?
Cicero
Language is a form of human reason, and has its reasons which are unknown to man
Claude Levi-Strauss
Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
David Hume
If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him
Easy Rider
In the area of politics our major policy obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions
Ed Murrow
Never depend the admiration of others. There is no strength in it. Personal merit cannot be derived from an external source
Epictetus - The Art of Living
When we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not
Epicurus
I drink to make other people more interesting
Ernest Hemingway
The way you make people feel is your reputation
Eugene Gess Man
All good moral philosophy is but a handmaid to religion
Francis Bacon
There is nothing makes a man suspect much more than to know little
Francis Bacon - Of Suspicion
There is a superstition in avoiding superstition
Francis Bacon - Of superstition
Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.
Francis Hutcheson
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved
Freud
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it
George Orwell
He who has a "why" can bare almost any "how"
Nietzsche
Mankind is divided into a minority of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much
Nietzsche
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual
Nietzsche
I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble about being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me
Paul Newman
We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard
Penelope Lively
Only where there are graves are there resurrections
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
There are many souls one will not discover unless one invents them first
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Do you think I'm a gulla-bull or even a gulla-calf
Wayne's World 2
"he who dies with the least toys wins. Because the more you know the less you need"
Yvon Chouinard
The past may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot
Mark Twaine
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
Marquis de Sade
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business
Martha Graham
A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard
Martin Luther King
We have guided missiles and misguided men
Martin Luther King
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men
Matthew Arnold
Never trivialise the meaning someone finds in a thing, its the truest and most beautiful thing there is, and no less important than the meaning you find in a thing. Thank god for meaning, for without it what would we do.
Me
There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market
Milton Friedman
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it
Nadine Gordimer
It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it
Nathan Mayer Rothschild
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
Nehru
Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up
Dostoyevsky
My only obligation is to keep myself and other people guessing
Jude Law
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Laurence J. Peter
So many people are used to seeing colour they treaty it like it's black and white
Anonymous
When a dream becomes part of your identity, its no longer just a dream
Anonymous
It'll about losing your brain without losing your mind
Michael J. Fox (on fight against Parkinson's Disease)
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
Antonio Gramsci
Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret
Aphra Behn
Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient
Aristotle
Got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight
Bruce Cockburn
Live by the foma (harmless untruths) that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy
Cat's Cradle (the philosophy of Bokonism)
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin
We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Anais Nin
Either we are not free and god the all powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but god is not all powerful
Camus
The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder
Glenn Gould
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle
Irina Dunn
Secrets are edged tools which must be kept from children and from fools
John Dryden
The old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined
The Beautiful and Damned
I ascribed these incidents to the only reasonable divinity, by which I mean chance.
The Fall, Camus
It is permissible ever for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
There is no treachery too base for the world to commit
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Prison is a most expensive way of making bad people worse
Ackner Lord
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down
Aneurin Bevan
"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
Anna Karenina
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error
Beetroot Brecht
"You call yourself a free spirit, a 'wild thing,' and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself."
Breakfast at Tiffany's
If we're all gonna die anyway shouldn't we be enjoying ourselves now? I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else
Dazed and Confused
There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk could not have been prevented. The common man is the great protection against war
Ernest Bevin
A crowd is not company, and faces but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love
Francis Bacon
Fame is like a river, that beats up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid
Francis Bacon - Of Praise
A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green
Francis Bacon - Of Revenge
To be born is to be wrecked on an island
J. M. Barrie
Book says: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't
Julian Barnes
"It is pleasant to watch a boat struggling at sea whilst one is safe on shore, or to look down from ones philosophical height upon armies clashing in the plain below, not because the wise man is a sadist, but because his mind is impassable, and no torment can touch it"
Lucretius
Everything that happens, the experience of pleasure, the winds blowing, the flowers blooming in the spring, the beasts rutting, the poet composing, has the same essential cause. Every action, all creation and all destruction are alike the product of the push and pull of atoms
Lucretius
The reflections of a shallow puddle appear as deep as the sky is high above us
Lucretius
The result is that no last frontier can ever stay in place, for possible flight of the spear forever pushes back the edge of space
Lucretius
If he be a stranger in the world that knows not the things that are in it; why not be a stranger as well that wonders at the things that are done in it?
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
"I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing."
Moby Dick
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants
Omar Bradley
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
On the road
Why do you look so sad Because you talk to me with words And I look at you with feelings You never have ideas, only feelings That's not true, feelings contain ideas
Pierrot le fou
"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."
Pride and Prejudice
The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself
Rita Mae Brown
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous
Robert Benchley
Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini
Robert Benchley
A stumble may prevent a fall
Thomas Fuller
The paths of glory lead but to the grave
Thomas Gray
It is what one takes into solitude that grows there, the beast within included. And so, many should be dissuaded from solitude.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
When a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something
Wilson Mizner
The average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
1984
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
1984
Individually, no member of the Party owns anything except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania
1984, the definition of 'collective oligarchy'
Actors are cattle
Alfred Hitchcock
The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform
Alfred Kinsey
Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven
Alphonse de Lamartine
A fish with his mouth closed never gets caught
Anonymous
For a lot of people, life is about finding a dream that locks you into a long term purpose - long enough to delay any bigger questions that might come creeping up on you
Anonymous
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else
Arthur Schopenhauer
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do
B.F. Skinner
The platonic mode of thought was an aristocratic mode of thought
Beyond Good and Evil
Bernard considered the electromagnetic golf as a waste of time. "Then what is time for?" asked Lenina, astonished.
Brave New World
Not every value entails rebellion, but eery act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value
Camus, The Rebel
I am unknowing
Death himself in The Seventh Seal
We make people more productive through the internalisation of discipline
Discipline and Punish
I wanted to become a Napoleon, and that's why I killed
Dostoyevsky
So we just sat there, and she started crying softly like the rain on the window
Double Indemnity
The birthrate is a barometer of despair
Dowel Myers
Say it's only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea
E.Y. Harburg
He that wrestled with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper
Edmund Burke
Laws like houses lean on one another
Edmund Burke
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds
Edmund Burke
We take no note of Time, but from its loss
Edward Young
Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?
Ernest Hemingway
"...going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. YOU can't get away from YOURSELF by moving from one place to another."
Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
Age appears to be best / in four things: // old wood best to burn, / old wine to drink, / old friends to trust, / and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon
If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us
Franz Kafka
It is true we love life; not because we are used to life, but because we are used to loving
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus spoke Zarathurstra
Wealth is like sea-water, the more we drink, the thirstier we become, the same is true for fame
Arthur Schopenhauer
For the sake of the laborers, it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.
Brave New World
I'll teach you, I'll make you be free whether you want to or not
Brave New World
It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness
C.H. Spurgeon
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
Carl Jung - Modern Man in Search of a Soul
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe
Carl Sagan
A wise traveller never despises his own country
Carlo Goldoni
There is nothing outside of the text
Derrida
All music jars when the soul's out of tune
Don Quixote
You never really learn much from hearing yourself talk
George Clooney
Life is a horizontal fall
Jean Cocteau
Every man desires to live long, but no man desires to be old
Jonathan Swift
An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper
Kahlil Gibran
Movements never quire exist, they are transitions, intermediaries between two existences, unaccented beasts
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements
Norman Douglas
We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist
Obama
What are days for? Days are where we live
Philip Larkin
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us
Pride and Prejudice
An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with the creator.
Proust
Love is space and time measured by the heart
Proust
I am the doubter and the doubt
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you
Richard Sheridan (said to a young lady)
Wine is bottled poetry
Robert Louis Stevenson
Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them
Robert Marquis de Flers
Not taking a risk is a risk
Robert Redford
Life is existential play
Sartre
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"
Simone de Beauvoir
"I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening!
T.S. Elliot
We are living in the wealthiest period in history, we're also living in the richest nation in the world (Credit Suisse)
The Barefoot Investor
I lived from day to day with no continuity other than me-me-me.
The Fall, Camus
One could not die without having confessed all one's lies. Not to God or to one of his representatives. It was a matter of confessing to mankind. Otherwise, if there was only a single lie that remained hidden in a life, death would make it absolute.
The Fall, Camus
That's what men are like: two-faced: they cannot love unless they love themselves.
The Fall, Camus
All things are no explained by one thing but by all things.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
The body's judgment is as good as the mind's and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Can one be a saint without God: that is the only concrete question that I know today
The Plague, Albert Camus
It's very easy to be different. But very difficult to be better.
Jonathan Ive
"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."
Kafka on the Shore
Empty-handed I entered the world, barefoot I leave it. My coming, my going - two simple happenings that got entangled.
Kozan Ichikyo
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta
Lolita
He did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the drivers seat
Lord Beaverbrook
Poetry is the lava of the imagination who's eruption prevents an earthquake
Lord Byron
Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open
Lord Dewar
A secret in the Oxford sense, you may tell it to only one person at a time
Lord Franks
It never ceases to amaze me: we all loves ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own
Marcus Aurelius
Never suppose that pain is evil
Marcus Aurelius
We are all the property of nature's laws
Marcus Aurelius
Man is to be held only by the slightest chains, with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport
Maria Edgeworth
No matter how much you embrace and extract every experience and detail out of every moment, it still passes. No matter how many times you are reborn with new eyes and feel with certainty you finally see the bigger picture, it's simply a new person to see life rush away from under your arms.
Me
It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always send you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance
Michel Montaigne
Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.
Montaigne
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself
Montaigne
There is no man, good as he may be, who if all his thoughts and actions were submitted to the scrutiny of the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
Montaigne
Life's too short to spend it worrying that life's too short
New Philosopher
Minimalism is not the lack of something, it's the perfect amount of something
Nicholas Burroughs
Man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys
Notes from Underground
Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain
Notes from Underground
The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have ben the same.
Orlando
Experience, the name that men give to their mistakes
Oscar Wilde
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame
Oscar Wilde
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Oscar Wilde
Comfort yourself, you would not seek me if you had not found me
Pascal
Art is either plagiarism or revolution
Paul Gauguin
A man can only be judged by his actions and not his good intentions or beliefs
Paul Newman
There is no history, only biography
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any man who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined
Sam Goldwyn
Some age, others mature
Sean Connery
A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man without trials
Seneca
He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary
Seneca
If we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago
Seneca
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it
Seneca
No man was ever wise by chance
Seneca
The body's needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger, and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs
Seneca - On The Shortness of Life
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes
Stanley Kubrick
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
Stephen Covey
"I am big! It's the pictures that got small."
Sunset Boulevard
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter; they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long
Sylvia Plath
When I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven't stopped since
Søren Kierkegaard
People say that separation, tends to revive love. Quite true, but it revives it in a purely poetic manner
Søren Kierkegaard - Either/Or
Human kind cannot bear very much reality
T.S. Eliot
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living
T.S. Eliot
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes
T.S. Eliot
It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting
The Alchemist
Moral conduct, as explained by Socrates, or as recommended by Christianity, is in itself a sign of decadence.
The Rebel, Camus
It is easier to forgive an enemy than it is to forgive a friend
William Blake
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom
William Blake
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food
William Hazlitt
Providence has given human wisdom the choice between two fates: either hope and agitation, or hopelessness and calm
Yevgeny Baratynsky
A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.
Horace
I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn at a red light
Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
Our relationship is like a shark, it's gotta keep moving, and I think what we've got on our hands right here is a dead shark
Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
Don't you dare try and shoehorn freedom into a vision/dream. Live your freedom now.
Anonymous
In this world, people value dreams over freedom. The irony is that they dream it the other way around.
Anonymous
Monday's are fine, it's your life that sucks
Anonymous
Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.
Anthony Trollope
You live not be things, but by the meaning of things
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth."
Aristotle
You should make a point of trying every experience once, except invest and folk dancing
Arnold Bax in "Farewell my Youth"
The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.
Art Linkletter
Nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all
Arthur James Balfour
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets
Arthur Miller
One can't forever stand on the short; at some point, even filled with indecision, scepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere
Arthur Miller - The Crucible
For each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him, for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked
Arthur Schopenhauer - Parerga and Paralipomena
Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Studies of Pessimism: A series of essays
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience
Atticus Finch
People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die
B. B. King
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten
B.F. Skinner
My dad didn't really want to have me. I always saw the world as this place I wasn't meant to be. I eventually kind of took pride in it, like my life was my own doing or something, like I was crashing the big party.
Before Sunrise
A memory is never finished as long as you're alive
Before Sunset
"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
Beloved, Toni Morrison
"Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Never apologise for showing feeling, my friend. Remember that when you do so, you apologise for truth.
Benjamin Disraeli
There are three kind of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics
Benjamin Disraeli
I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole
Benjamin Disraeli (on becoming prime minister)
Many people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75
Benjamin Franklin
Necessity never made a good bargain
Benjamin Franklin
Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
'Change' is scientific, 'progress' is ethical
Bertrand Russell
The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sounds reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically
Bertrand Russell
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness
Bertrand Russell
Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness
Bertrand Russell - The Conquest of Happiness
Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world
Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity
Beyond Good and Evil
A thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think"
Beyond Good and Evil
As soon as philosophy begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world in its own image. Philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world"
Beyond Good and Evil
By means of music the very passions enjoy themselves
Beyond Good and Evil
Certain physiological demands get in the way of pure philosophy, for example that the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than truth
Beyond Good and Evil
Commanders and independent individuals will finally be lacking altogether, or they will suffer inwardly from a bad conscience, and will have to impose a deception on themselves in the first place in order to be able to command just as if they also were only obeying (like the majority of people who are operating as if they are obeying those few commanders - everyone has to obey something it is part of the human condition). This is known as the "moral hypocrisy of the commanding class". They know no other way of protecting themselves from their bad conscience than by playing the role of executors of older and higher orders, or they even justify themselves by maxims from the current opinions of the herd, as "first servants of their people".
Beyond Good and Evil
Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where he may forget men who are the rule
Beyond Good and Evil
I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy; but the another impulse has only made use of knowledge as an instrument
Beyond Good and Evil
I think therefore I am doesn't even work - "The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing about all things, but the philosopher must say to himself, 'When I analyse the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think', I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance that it is "I" who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity, an operation on the part of a being, who is though to fas a cause, that there is an 'ego', and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking - that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion 'I think" assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself
Beyond Good and Evil
If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee
Beyond Good and Evil
In man creature and created are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos: but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer.
Beyond Good and Evil
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule
Beyond Good and Evil
It may be doubted whether antitheses exist at all
Beyond Good and Evil
Not to cleave to a fatherland
Beyond Good and Evil
People have becomes so attached to the act of willing, to such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing suffices for action
Beyond Good and Evil
Systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions
Beyond Good and Evil
The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills
Beyond Good and Evil
The belief in "immediate certainties" is a moral naïveté
Beyond Good and Evil
The greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels
Beyond Good and Evil
The moral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown
Beyond Good and Evil
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night
Beyond Good and Evil
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other emotions
Beyond Good and Evil
The worst kind of errors have been dogmatic errors
Beyond Good and Evil
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena
Beyond Good and Evil
To ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification of all the commonplaceness
Beyond Good and Evil
To recognise untruth as a condition of life, that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby placed itself beyond good and evil
Beyond Good and Evil
Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself
Beyond Good and Evil
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil
Beyond Good and Evil
Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence
Beyond Good and Evil
Why might not the world which concerns us be a fiction? And to anyone who suggested: "But to a fiction belong an originator" might it not be bluntly replied: Why? May not this "belong" also belong to the fiction?
Beyond Good and Evil
Willing for something or to "will" is essentially just an emotion
Beyond Good and Evil
With regard to what "truthfulness" is, perhaps nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful
Beyond Good and Evil
With regards to discussions about the soul, there is no distinction between discovering something about it and inventing something about it (this is absolute freedom)
Beyond Good and Evil
Would you rather put your last trust in a sure nothing or an uncertain something?
Beyond Good and Evil
Ye Utilitarians - ye, too, love the UTILE only as a VEHICLE for you inclinations - ye, too, really find the noise of its wheels insupportable
Beyond Good and Evil
You desire to live "according to nature". Oh you noble Stoics, what Fraud of words!
Beyond Good and Evil
Stoicism is self-tyranny
Beyond Good and Evil - this is because it is fundamentally impractical to live a life in the pure pursuit of truth - almost a fetishisation of truth, because inevitably we need untruths or illusions to sustain a happy life
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just
Blaise Pascal
The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Blaise Pascal
Money doesn't talk, it swears
Bob Dylan
Loss is a collaborative art between the people that leave us and those who remain, we dance with the shadows of their absence
Bojack Horseman
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
Boris Pasternak
"Then you think there is no God?" "No I think there quite probably is one" "Then why?" "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifests himself as the being that's described in these books" "How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage "Well, he manifests himself as an absence, as if he weren't there at all"
Brave New World
Alphas can be completely socialised, but only on the condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run.
Brave New World
My dear young friend, civilisation has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organised society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there obviously nobility and heroism have some sense
Brave New World
The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible". "Of course it does, actual happiness always looks pretty squalid with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Brave New World
Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus? Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut. We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas - that is to say by seperate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!
Brave New World (essentially what its saying is that those at the top, the Alphas serve no more important purpose than those at the bottoms (the epsilons), because of this they are manufactured just like any other position, they differ from the others in terms of rank, not importance, they are no more special). The same can be applied to real life, money has manufactured individuals to be hierarchically different, but those at the top are no more special or important than those at the bottom (the poor). So not only does money not make you any happier within yourself, from an external perspective it makes you no more important or special than anyone else in society, you merely have assumed a different rank. In this way money is an illusion to the individual in 2 ways, internally and externally. You are not better or happier.
on being asked 'what was the message of your play ?' after a performance of The Hostage: Message? Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?
Brendan Behan
I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot count the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.
Camus, The Rebel
Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended
Camus, The Rebel
The problem of rebellion seems to assume a precise meaning only within the confines of Western thought. It is possible to be even more explicit by remarking, like Scheler, that the spirit of rebellion finds few means of expression in societies where inequalities are very great (the Hindu caste system) or, again, in those where there is absolute equality (certain primitive societies). The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Camus, The Rebel
The very first thing that cannot be denied is the right of others to live
Camus, The Rebel
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Carl Jung
Every moment dies as a man
Charles Babbage
I see men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas
Charles Bukowski
I stopped looking for a dream girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare
Charles Bukowski
If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget. If something good happens you drink in order to celebrate, and if nothing happens you drink in order to make something happen
Charles Bukowski
The best advice I ever received: no one else knows what they are doing either
Charles Bukowski
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat
Charles Bukowski - Factotum
The only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them
Charles Bukowski - Ham on Rye
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer
Charles Caleb Colton
A man without faith is like a fish without a bicycle
Charles Harris
The key to economic prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction
Charles Kettering
To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse German
Charles V, King of Spain
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word
Charles de Gaulle
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up , but a comedy in long-shot.
Charlie Chaplin
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid
Chernobyl
You know the old Russian proverb: "Trust but verify"
Chernobyl
"They looked like two children" she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (describing two killers as looking like children)
"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."
Cicero, 1st Century BCE; Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, and consul.
It's a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have
Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven
A woman can be overdressed, but never over-elegant
Coco Chanel
Fashion is made to become unfashionable
Coco Chanel
A great mind is androgynous
Coleridge
The superior man understands righteousness, the inferior man understands profit
Confucius
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large
Confucius - happiness is a self-fulfilling prophecy that replicates itself the more we find reasons for its existence
"We live as we dream - alone"
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real
Cormac McCarthy
Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
Count Oxenstierna
Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.
D.H. Lawrence
We soon learn that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature.
David Hume
Conversing with those of past centuries is much the same as travelling
Descartes
"Nobody puts Baby in a corner.
Dirty Dancing
"The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never clsoed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination"
Discipline and Punish
An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience
Don Marquis
Ingratitude is the daughter of pride
Don Quixote
When justice is doubtful you should lean towards mercy
Don Quixote
The masses are almost never prepared to acknowledge them the right to crime, they flog them or hang them, thereby quite correctly exercising their conservative function, the only slightly odd thing being that in subsequent generations those same masses put on a pedestal the people they've flogged or executed and pay homage to them and their ideas/discoveries that brought change to society
Dostoyevsky
I killed him for money, and I killed him for a woman, but I didn't get the money, and I didn't get the woman
Double Indemnity
It's just like the first time I came here. We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet
Double Indemnity
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it
Dwight Eisenhower
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America
Dwight Eisenhower
She knew she loved him when home went from being a place to being a person
E. Leventhal
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge, the poor cannot afford it
E. M. Forster
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for out wits to grow sharper
Eden Phillpotts
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time
Edith Wharton
Society is indeed a contract, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, who are dead, and those who are yet to be born
Edmund Burke
No two persons ever read the same book
Edmund Wilson
That inverted bowl we call the sky, tis all a chequer board of nights and days
Edward Fitzgerald
Conversation enriches the understanding but solitude is the school of genius
Edward Gibbon
"The lamps are going out all over Europe. They will not be lit again in our lifetime."
Edward Grey
There are only 2 industries which call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software
Edward Tufte
To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure
Edward Young
Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze
Elinor Glyn
I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate. I do, yet dare not say I ever meant. I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.
Elizabeth 1
Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand
Elizabeth, Countess von Arnim
Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear
Emil Cioran
Since freedom is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
Emil Cioran - On the Heights of Despair
Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment
Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born
Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate
Emily Dickinson
Not things, but opinions about things trouble men
Epictetus
"Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink; for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf"
Epicurus
"Of all the things that Wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship"
Epicurus
"The man that alleges that he is not yet ready for philosophy or that the time for it has passed him by, is like the man who says that he is either too young or too old for happiness"
Epicurus
Death has no meaning for us, for what is indefinable is incapable of feeling, and what is incapable of feeling has no meaning for us
Epicurus
Remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for
Epicurus
This was the kind of war which existed in order to produce victory parades
Eric Hobsbawm (of the Falklands War)
Jealousy is all the fun you THINK they had
Erica Jong
IN the nineteenth century the problem was that god is dead, in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead
Erich Fromm
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level
Ernest Becker
Difficulties are just things to overcome after all
Ernest Shackleton
It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before
F Scott Fitzgerald
You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known - and even that is an understatement
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly. And when I got it, it turned to dust in my hands
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and the Damned
Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honour those whom they have slain
Fedor Dostoevsky
Language can be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time.
Ferdinand de Saussure
"You have not God anymore?" "No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God"
For Whom The Bell Tolls
You will have to take death as an aspirin
For Whom The Bell Tolls
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs
Francis Darwin (son of Charles Darwin)
Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies
Francis M. Cornford
In most of mankind, gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favors
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
The glory of great men should always be measured against the means they used to acquire it
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none
Francois-Rene Chateaubriand
Alcohol may be a man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy
Frank Sinatra
I am free and that is why I am lost
Franz Kafka
there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we are driven out of Paradise; because of impatience we cannot return.
Franz Kafka
You are at once, both the quiet and the confusion of my heart
Franz Kafka - Letters to Felice
I drank, because I wanted to drown my sorrows but now the damned things have learned to swim
Frida Kahlo
How could you become new if you had not first become ashes
Friedrich Nietzsche
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever possesses little is possessed that much less
Friedrich Nietzsche
All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freeman; for whoever has not two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave
Friedrich Nietzsche - Human All Too Human
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs, he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness...Because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power
Architecture in general is frozen music
Friedrich von Schelling
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated
G. K. Chesterton
Happiness is a mystery like religion and should never be rationalised
G. K. Chesterton
It is the test of good religion whether you can joke about it
G. K. Chesterton
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling
G. K. Chesterton
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It's the democracy of the dead
G. K. Chesterton
What we all dread most is a maze with no centre
G. K. Chesterton
The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset
Geoffrey Madan
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I squandered
George Best
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker
George Eliot
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow
George Eliot
If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally
George Eliot
Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts, not to hurt others
George Eliot
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history
George Eliot
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)
George Orwell
The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good
George Orwell
"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
George Orwell - 1984
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
George Santayana
Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one
George Savile
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world
Georges Duhamel
If a government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have
Gerald Ford
The world of adventure, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill
Gertrude Bell
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts
Gustave Flaubert
To please women you either have to be carefree and play the fool or else be tragic and passionate. When you say to them quite simply that you love them, women laugh at you
Gustave Flaubert
The citizen's first duty is unrest
Günter Grass
"Violence is as American as cherry pie"
H. Rap Brown - American black power leader
Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking
H.L. Mencken
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking
Haruki Murakami
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Hector Berlioz
What then is music? It exists between thought and phenomenon, like a twilight medium, it stands between spirit and matter, related to and yet different from both; it is spirit, but spirit governed by time; it is matter, but matter that can manage without space
Heinrich Heine
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land
Helen Keller
You cannot put together a personality with clothes. It only reaches up to the neck and then it ends
Helmut Lang
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory
Henri Bergson
If youth knew; if age could.
Henri Estienne
Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder
Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.
Henry David Thoreau
What we call evil is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark
Henry Ford
War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.
Henry Maine
Don't look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad
Henry Miller
It takes two to speak the truth, - one to speak, and another to hear
Henry Thoreau
The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A man's character is his fate
Heraclitus
Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom
Herbert Spencer
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
Herbert Spencer
The truth is lived, not taught
Hermann Hesse
In peace the sons bury their fathers and in war the fathers bury their sons
Herodotus
The fool learns by suffering
Hesiod
Asking the ignorant to use the incomprehensible to decide the unknowable
Hiller B. Zobel (on juries)
If I'm not a genius, I'm done for
Honré de Balzac
Anger is a short madness.
Horace
How is it, that no one lives contented with his lot, whether he has planned it for himself or fate has flung him into it, but yet he praises those who follow different paths.
Horace
Lost, yesterday, somewhere between Sunrise and Sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever
Horace Mann
Sprezzatura is elegance by nature not by effort
Hugo Jacomet
I love you....That is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.
Ian McEwan
In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so
Immanuel Kant
An image presented to us by life brings us in reality, in that moment, multiple and different sensations. The sight, for example, of the cover of a book already read has, woven into the letters of its title, the moonbeams of a distant summer night. An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres. What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously
In Search of Lost Time
And I began to divine this cause as I compared these varied impressions of well-being with each other, all of which, the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven flagstones, the taste of the madeleine, had something in common, which I was experiencing in the present moment and at the same time in a moment far away, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. This explained why my anxieties on the subject of my death had ceased the moment when I unconsciously recognsied the taste of the little madeleine, since at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being, and consequently unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the future
In Search of Lost Time
And thinking once again about the extra-temporal joy caused by the sound of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, I said to myself: "Was this the happiness which the sonata's little phrase offered to Swann, which he was unable to find in artistic creation and therefore mistook by assimilating it to the pleasure of love?"
In Search of Lost Time
Between the memory of a dream and the memory of something real, there is no great difference.
In Search of Lost Time
Desire is so strong that it engenders belief; I had believed that Albertine would not leave, because it was my desire.
In Search of Lost Time
Having in the past often thought with terror that one day he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had promised himself to be vigilant and as soon as he felt his love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it, to keep hold of it. But now, corresponding to the weakening of his love there was a simultaneous weakening of his desire to remain in love. For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.
In Search of Lost Time
How could Albertine have appeared dead to me, when now in order to think of her I had at my disposal only the same images that I saw alternately when she was alive
In Search of Lost Time
I had spend the afternoon on an excursion with Albertine, I was dining in two days time with Mme de Guermantes and I needed to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, it occured to me that our social life, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches depicting our momentary attempts to capture our need for a great love, but what did not occur to me was that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, we may return to it and transform it into a completely different work, possibly more important than the one we had originally planned.
In Search of Lost Time
If life does not bring changes to our love, soon we ourselves will want to do so, or to pretend that they have occurred, so evident is it that all loves and all things move rapidly towards farewells. We want to weep the tears that the ending will bring, long before it happens
In Search of Lost Time
In love it is easier to uproot a feeling than to give up a habit
In Search of Lost Time
Knowing a thing does not always mean preventing a thing, but at least the things we know, we always hold, if not in our hands, at least in our minds where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them
In Search of Lost Time
Maybe it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is non-existent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing also. We will perish but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, and perhaps less probable.
In Search of Lost Time
Our desire interweave with each other; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire which longed for it.
In Search of Lost Time
Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.
In Search of Lost Time
Regret amplifies desire
In Search of Lost Time
Regret, like desire seeks satisfaction
In Search of Lost Time
The habit of associating the person of Albertine with emotions that I had not derived from her directly led me none the less to feel that they were special to her.
In Search of Lost Time
The idea that we shall die is more cruel than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that someone else is dead - that when the waters of reality close after having engulfed a person's being, they smoothly, without so much as a ripple, cover the spot from which that being stood
In Search of Lost Time
The things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but not recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation.
In Search of Lost Time
The truth caught me totally unprepared. Truly I would have preferred to have had more strength to devote to such a revelation; it remained external, for I had not yet found a place for it in my heart
In Search of Lost Time
Was it no more than a moment of the past? Perhaps it was a great deal more; something which, common both to the past and the present, is much more essential than either of them. So many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent. But now all the consequences of that iron law had suddenly been neutralized, suspended, by a wonderful natural expedient, which had held out the prospect of a sensation - sound of a fork and a hammer, same book title, etc - both in the past, which enabled my imagination to enjoy it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of experiencing the sound, the touch of linen, etc. had added to the dreams of the imagination the thing which they were habitually deprived of, the idea of existence - and, thanks to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilise - for the duration of a flash of lightning - the one thing it never apprehends: a little bit of time in its pure state.
In Search of Lost Time
We try to rediscover in things, now precious because of it, the glimmer that our soul projected on them, we are disappointed to find that they seem to lack in nature the charm they derived in our thoughts from the proximity of certain ideas
In Search of Lost Time
What a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses.
In Search of Lost Time
Words do not change their meaning over the centuries as much as names do for us in the space of a few years.
In Search of Lost Time
Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him
Irvin Yalom - Existential Psychotherapy
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
Isaac Newton
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan Illich
Death is liked a fisherman, who, having caught a fish in his net, leaves it in the water for a time; the fish continues to swim about, but all the while the net is round it, and the fisherman will snatch it out in his own good time.
Ivan Turgenev
If you can actually count your money then you are not really a rich man
J. Paul Getty
"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
JFK
No matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind
Jack Kerouac - Lonesome Traveler
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Jacobus Johannes van der Leeuw
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more
Jane Austen, Emma
An artist can not speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticultural
Jean Cocteau
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood
Jean Cocteau
My though is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking.
Jean Paul Sartre - Nausea
The biologist passes, the frog remains
Jean Rostand
No doctrine is more optimistic than existentialism, since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself
Jean-Paul Sartre
The more strictly we are watched the better we behave
Jeremy Bentham
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Doubt grows with knowledge
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Talent develops in quite places, character in the full current of human life
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support
John Buchan
The Thames is liquid history
John Burns
When so ever my affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart, as mine own sword
John Donne (on suicide)
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesser, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any hands death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne.
But transient is the smile of fate, a little rule, a little sway, a sunbeam in a winter's day, is all the proud and mighty have between the cradle and the grave
John Dyer
He hath shook hands with time
John Ford
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
John Ruskin
Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so
John Stuart Mill
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these; 'It might have been'
John Whittier
Love...that cordial drop heaven in our cup has thrown to make the nauseous draught of life go down.
John Wilmot, Lord Rochester
If you love two people at the same time, choose the second one. Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second
Johnny Depp
Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: 1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back 2. Treat yourself like you are someone that you care about / someone you are responsible for helping 3. Make friends with people who want the best for you 4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today 5. Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) 8. Tell the truth, or at least don't lie 9. Assume the person that you are listening to might know something you don't 10. Be precise in your speech 11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding 12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
Jordan Peterson
The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that's so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant
Jordan Peterson
Your ideas control you just like a puppeteer controlling a puppet
Jordan Peterson
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence
Jorge Luis Borges
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.
Joseph Campbell
For me, writing is just simply the conversion of nervous force into phrases
Joseph Conrad
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures is on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - and expires too soon, too soon, before life itself
Joseph Conrad
Snobbishness is the desire for what divides men, and the instability to value what unites them.
Joseph Epstein
Men will almost always believe what they wish
Julius Caesar
People don't have ideas, ideas have people
Jung
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves
Kahlil Gibran
I dream of a day when I walk down the street and hear people talk about morality, sustainability and philosophy instead of Kardashians
Keane Reeves
Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours
Khaled Hosseini
Your children are not your children. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, you may house their bodies but not their moulds, you may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you
Khalil Gibran
Faith requires the crucifixion of reason
Kierkegaard
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the centre
Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano
the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley
One should live outside passions, beyond emotions, in that harmony you find in completed artworks, in that enchanted order
La Dolce Vita
I'm like Keith Richards, I'm just happy to be anywhere
Lady Bird
If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present
Lao Tzu - people are happiest when they are engaged in things that require their full and present attention, e.g. good conversation, creative tasks, or sex
Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism
Lenin
If one loves anyone, one loves the whole person just as they are, and not as one would like them to be
Leo Tolstoy
People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life
Leo Tolstoy
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Doubt must not be more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous
Lichtenberg
Judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them
Lichtenberg
Buongiorno, Principessa!
Life is Beautiful
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learnt how to live
Lin Yutang
Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in lfie.
Linus Pauling
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life
Lolita
The Pentagon, that immense monument to modern man's subservience to the desk
Lord Franks
A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world
Louis Pasteur
Temporary: I have never heard such a word that makes me feel both terrified and relieved
Mandeq Ahmed
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed
Mao Zedong
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others
Marcel Proust - The Captive
Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back
Marcus Aurelius
If it's not in your control don't worry about it, what are you going to do blame the atoms?
Marcus Aurelius
Man, you have been a citizen in this world city, what does it matter whether for five or fifty years?
Marcus Aurelius
That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bee
Marcus Aurelius
That which is past and that which is future cannot hurt thee, only that which is present
Marcus Aurelius
The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.
Marcus Aurelius
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now takes what's left and live it properly
Marcus Aurelius
Those who grieve and those who are angry have equally received a wound
Marcus Aurelius
To live a good life, we have the potential for it. If we learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference
Marcus Aurelius
The bird does not know how old it is - the rose tree does not count its birthdays
Marie Corelli
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose
Mario Cuomo
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example
Mark Twain
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
Mark Twain
Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.
Martin Luther
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King
The priest persuades humble people to endure their hard lot; the politician urges them to rebel against it; and the scientist thinks of a method that does away with the hard lot altogether.
Max Perutz
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self
May Sarton
Growing up is the process of gradually understanding and coming to terms with the life's inevitabilities
Me
I don't want to be happy, I want to be authentically content. To me that feeling surpasses any other feeling in terms of its depth and breadth/duration, and is the ultimate state within which I wish to exist. Happiness is a cheap thrill that can be bought at any time
Me
I learnt everything so I may have a a chance at escaping everything
Me
If you make fun of a thing someone finds meaningful you aren't making fun of the thing, you aren't even just making fun of the meaning they find in that thing, you are making fun of their whole system of creating and finding meaning in the first place, and that is the cruelest thing on earth - to make fun of the way someone finds meaning.
Me
Meaning and freedom are the two ingredients that make up the cocktail of life, and that cocktail tastes sweet in an infinite amount of different ways. What a creation
Me
Amor Fati
Meaning love of one's fate, sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or at the very least necessary.
As for thy body, which is a vessel, or a case, compasseth thee about, and the many and curious instruments that it hath annexed unto it, let them not trouble thy thoughts. For of themselves they are but as a carpenter's axe, but they are born with us . But otherwise, those parts are of themselves of no more use unto us, than the shuttle is of itself to the weaver, or the pen to the writer, or the whip to the coachman
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
As the spider, when it hath caught the fly that it hunted is not little proud, nor meanly conceited of herself: as he likewise that hath caught an hare, or hath taken a fish with his net: as another for taking of a boar, and another of a bear: so may they be proud, and applaud themselves for their valiant acts. For these also, these famous soldiers and warlike men, if thou dost look into their minds and opinions, what do they for the most part but hunt after prey
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Doth the emerald become worse in itself or more vile if it be not commended? - on being praised and humility
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Man's life is but for a very moment of time, and so depart meek and contented, even as if a ripe olive falling should praise the ground that bare her, and give thanks to the tree that begat her.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The new born soul is a sheet of paper ready for writing
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The world is mere change, and this life, opinion
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
There is, who without so much as a book doth put philosophy in action
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
I'm every Bourgeois nightmare - a cockney with intelligence and a million dollars
Michael Caine
An idea does not pass from one language to another without change
Miguel de Unamuno
"I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me"
Montaigne
"Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses. Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies"
Montaigne
Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.
Montaigne.
"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."
Mr. Antolini, Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life - one scratched on the wall.
Mrs Dalloway
The skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame
Mrs Dalloway
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one
Nabokov
Existence is not something which allows itself to be thought of from a distance; it has to invade you suddenly, pounce upon you, weigh heavily on your heart like a huge motionless animal
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail.
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
My whole life is behind me. I see it completely, I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say about it: a lost game, that's all. Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
This morning I took a bath, I shaved. Only when I think back over all those careful little actions, I can't understand how I could bring myself to perform them. They are so futile. It was my habits, probably, which performed them for me. They aren't dead, my habits, they go on bustling about, gently, insidiously, weaving their webs, they wash me, dry me, dress me, like nursemaids.
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The problem is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning and motivation it implies that they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
Nicolas Chamfort
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvellously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time
Nietzsche
The transition from religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap which is not to be recommended. In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be recommended to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions. Out of the illogical comes much good. It is rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life. It is only the naive people that believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one.
Nietzsche
We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed
Nietzsche
What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon
Nietzsche
When everyone is wrong, everyone is right
Nivelle de la Chaussee
"What's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss?"
No country for old men
Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me
North by Northwest
A true autobiography is almost an impossibility, man is bound to lie about himself.
Notes from Underground
And how do they know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What made them conceive that man wants a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPDENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever that independence may lead.
Notes from Underground
But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old habits, and when common sense and habit have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests.
Notes from Underground
Even in toothache there is enjoyment
Notes from Underground
For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing
Notes from Underground
Good heavens gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!
Notes from Underground
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key
Notes from Underground
She won't mind an extra guest? An old friend is never an extra guest
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)
A hundred rabbits will never make a horse, a hundred suspicions will never make a case
Old english proverb
'The sky is blue' he said, 'the grass is green' Looking up he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair, and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false. And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection
Orlando
A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us.
Orlando
For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.
Orlando
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Orlando
A film is never relaly good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet
Orson Welles
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, history would have been different."
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
Great lights glimmers between the two poles of the world the galaxy that maketh wise men doubt
Paradiso
All the misfortunes of men derive from one single thing, which is their inability to be at ease in a room
Pascal
Perfume lives in time; it has its youth, its maturity and its old age. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life can it be called successful.
Perfume
Why should smoke possess only the name 'smoke', when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire...or why should earth, landscape, air - each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity - still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all.
Perfume
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults
Peter de Vries
Do you know who you are? I'm just a huge question mark overlooking the Mediterranean
Pierrot le fou
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible
Pindar, Pythian iii
"You have bewitched me, body and soul"
Pride and Prejudice
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Proust
The only paradise is paradise lost
Proust
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost
Proust
To accept a favour is to sell your freedom
Publilius Syrus
Jules Winnfield: Does he look like a bitch? Brett: No! Jules Winnfield: Then why are you trying to **** him like a bitch?
Pulp Fiction
You are carrying within yourself the potential to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, accept it and do not hate anything
Rainer Maria Rilke
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first wealth is health
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's no difference between getting what you want and not wanting it anymore, because either way you scratch the itch
Random instagram guy, the goal should be to not want things
Most political thought is either retrospective or utopian
Raymon Aron
LA, a big hard boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup
Raymond Chandler
I got the bullets!
Rebel Without a Cause
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary
Reinhold Niebuhr
It's a pretty poem Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer
Richard Bentley
I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.
Richard Rumbold
A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside
Richard Sheridan, (on being encountered drinking a glass of wine in the street, while watching his theatre, the Drury Lane, burn down)
A man's reach should always exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired
Robert Frost
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money
Robert Graves
In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
Robert Runcie
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat
Roberty Frost
Cat and mouse, cat and mouse, but which is the cat and which is the mouse?
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)
We agreed there was only one crime either of us could commit, the crime of making a mistake
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction
Saint-Exupery - Airman's Odyssey
Even death is unreliable, it may be some ghastly hallucination
Samuel Beckett
I could not have gone on through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence
Samuel Beckett
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now
Samuel Beckett
Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be trouble by anything again
Samuel Beckett
An apology for the Devil: it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books
Samuel Butler
An odd thought strikes me: we shall receive no letters in the grave
Samuel Johnson
If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man should keep his friendship in constant repair.
Samuel Johnson
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To know what life is worth you have to risk it every once in a while
Sartre
I like to see it flow from my fingers and vanish...It must disappear on insubstantial fireworks for example, on an evening out: going to some dancehall, spending big, going everywhere by taxi
Sartre on Money
You know what 4 dollars buys today? It don't even buy 3 dollars
Saturday Night Fever
"Deceptive images of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected shapes and we search in vain for their original...Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them"
Schopenhauer
"There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy...So long as we persist in this inborn error, the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence"
Schopenhauer
"Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be offering peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me - money, public office, influence - I relegated to a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me. Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely taken them, not torn them from me"
Seneca
"The wise man is self-sufficient in that he can do without friends, not that he desires to do without them"
Seneca
It's not that we have a short time to live but that we waste a lot of it
Seneca
Let us say what we feel, and feel what we say, let speech harmonise with life
Seneca
Frozen anger
Sigmund Freud (his definition of depression)
An intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his cell.
Simone Weil
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell
Simone Weil
There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing
Sir Rannulph Fiennes
Time as we know it is but five days elder than ourselves
Sir Thomas Browne
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure to all diseases
Sir Thomas Browne
Tralfamadorians don't see humans as two-legged creatures, but as great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other
Slaughter House 5 (shows an interesting conception of time as a whole)
Not life, but a good life, is chiefly valued
Socrates
The secret of happiness you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less
Socrates
How many things I can do without!
Socrates (on looking at a multitude of goods exposed for sale)
Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced
Soren Kierkegaard
Study as if you were to live forever, live as if you were to die tomorrow
St Edmund of Abingdon
Beauty is only a promise of happiness
Stendhal
A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right
Stephan Jay Gould
Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Stephen Hawking
If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest too.
Sting (Gordon Sumner)
We ain't gotta dream no more man
Stringer Bell
A throw of the dice will never eliminate chance
Stéphane Mallarmé
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life
Summer in Algiers - Camus
I know simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death?
Summer in Algiers - Camus
Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try their skill at enjoyment and at "indulging in experiences". But this is illusory
Summer in Algiers - Camus
Someone has somewhere commented on the fact that millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon
Susan Ertz
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature
Susanne Langer
With every increase in the degree of consciousness, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair
Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning
T.S. Eliot
SOMEDAY, A REAL RAIN WILL COME AND WASH ALL THIS SCUM OFF THE STREETS
Taxi Driver
Time is the longest distance between two places
Tennessee Williams
Personal isn't that same as important.
Terry Pratchett
Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know - there's a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as it's always done, and take everything from me - loved ones, property, everything; but it can't take that. Some day I'll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
There were people who did not exist at all, mere puffs of smoke, and others who existed rather too much. The barman, for instance. A little while ago he had been smoking a cigarette, as vague and poetic as a flowering creeper: now he had awakened, he was much the barman, manipulating his shaker, opening it, and tipping yellow froth into glasses with slightly superfluous precision: he was impersonating a barman. Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all, or impersonating what one is.
The Age of Reason
Brave men despise cowards, don't let them see you are afraid
The Alchemist
Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances
The Beautiful and Damned
The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes
The Beautiful and Damned
This night, this glow, the cessation of anxiety and the sense that if living was not purposeful it was, at any rate, essentially romantic! Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure
The Beautiful and Damned
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am."
The Bell Jar
**** it dude, let's go bowling
The Big Lebowski
I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me - Because, if thee isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself - and that's much more frightening!
The Cocktail Party (T.S. Elliot)
All my faults turned to my advantage. Being obliged to conceal the depravity in my life gave me a cold manner which was confused with a virtuous one, my indifference won me love and my selfishness ended in acts of generosity.
The Fall, Camus
By not being romantic, I nourished romantic ideas in others, because our women friends have one thing in common with Bonaparte, which is that they always think they will succeed where others have failed.
The Fall, Camus
Death is solitary whilst servitude is collective.
The Fall, Camus
He was bored, that's all, bored, like most people; so he created from scratch a life of complications and drama for himself. Something's got to happen - that's the explanation for most human undertakings. Something's got to happen, even if it's slavery without love, or war, or death.
The Fall, Camus
I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers
The Fall, Camus
I was at ease with everything yet satisfied with nothing. Each joy made me yearn for another.
The Fall, Camus
If we are to end doubt, we are to stop existing, purely and simply.
The Fall, Camus
It is hard to admit, but I should have exchanged ten meetings with Einstein for a first encounter with a pretty chorus girl. True, after the tenth encounter with her, I would be sighing for Einstein or a serious book. In short, I have never bothered about weighty matters except in the intervals between my little excesses.
The Fall, Camus
It matters little, wouldn't you say, to abase one's mind if by that means one succeeds in dominating everyone. I found that there were sweet dreams of oppression within me.
The Fall, Camus
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures
The Fall, Camus
Punishment without judgement is bearable. Actually, it has a name which ensures our innocence: we call it 'misfortune'. No on the contrary, it's a question of curtailing judgement, of escaping always being judged, without the sentence every being pronounced.
The Fall, Camus
They always think that people commit suicide for a reason. But one can very well commit suicide for two reasons. Once you're dead, they'll take the opportunity to assign idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. My dear friend, martyrs should choose to be forgotten, mocked or exploited. As for being understood, never.
The Fall, Camus
To be stopped in the corridors of the law courts, for example, by the wife of a defendant whom one has represented simply out of justice or pity, by which I mean for free, and hearing this woman murmur that nothing, no, nothing can repay what one has done for them, and then replying that it was quite normal, anyone would have done as much and even offering assistance in getting through the hard days ahead, kissing the poor woman's hand and leaving - that, believe me, is to reach a point above mere ambition and to rise to the highest summit, where virtue is no longer sustained by anything but itself.
The Fall, Camus
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough with our help.
The Fall, Camus
What does it matter, after all? Don't lies in the end put us on the path to truth? And don't my stories, true or false, point to the same conclusion. Don't they have the same meaning? Like light, truth dazzles. Untruth, on the other hand, is a beautiful dusk that enhances everything.
The Fall, Camus
Men are not convinced of your arguments, your sincerity or the seriousness of your suffering, except by your death. As long as you are alive, your case is debatable and you only deserve their scepticism.
The Fall, Camus (on suicide)
So I had won, indeed, doubly so because, apart from the desire that I felt for them, I was satisfying my love for myself by proving my exceptional abilities on every occasion.
The Fall, Camus (on women and dating)
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species
The Gay Science
The four errors: Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, further he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and un-conditional. If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness and human dignity.
The Gay Science
"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."
The Handmaid's Tale
"What matters," said Nietzsche, "is not eternal life but eternal vivacity"
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
All systems of morality are based on the idea that na action has consequences that legitimise or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
At last man will again find there the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognises his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
For Kirilov as for Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realise on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks. But if this metaphysical crime is enough for man's fulfilment, why add suicide? Why kill oneself and leave this world after having won freedom? That is contradictory.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
From the abstract god of Husserl to the dazzling god of Kierkegaard the distance is not so great. Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching. In truth the way matters but little; the will to arrive suffices.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that is what I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
I said that the world is absurd, but was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
I want everything to explained to me or nothing.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
If wish to limit myself to facts, I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can say that I also know what links them. I have no need to dig deeper. A single certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has to derive all the consequences from it.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars and even peace treaties. For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive the absurd cannot be settled.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
In reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
In this unintelligible and limited universe, man's fate henceforth assumes its meaning.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that there is no truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end. Men who die by their own hand consequently follow to its conclusion their emotional inclination. Reflection on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only problem to interest me: is there a logic to the point of death?
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
It would be wrong to see a symbol in it and to think that the work of art can be considered at last as a refuge for the absurd. It is itself an absurd phenomenon, and we are concerned merely with its description. It does not offer an escape for the intellectual ailment. Rather, it is one of the symptoms of the ailment which reflects it throughout a man's whole thought.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: "tomorrow", "later on" "when you have made your way" "you will understand when you are old enough"
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Mere "anxiety" as Heidegger says, is at the source of everything
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
On the plane of history, such a constancy of two attitudes illustrates the essential passion of man torn between his urge toward unity and the clear vision he may have of the walls enclosing him.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Such men know to begin with, and then their whole effort is to examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which they have just landed.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Suicide is an insult to existence.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorise all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day to day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is his defiance.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
The theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existential, is reason becoming confused and escaping by negating itself. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
There is thus a metaphysical honour in enduring the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt and tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly, the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men have thought of their own suicide
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
To destroy one of its terms is to destroy the whole. There can be no absurd outside the human mind. Thus, like everything else, the absurd ends with death.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
To speak clearly, to the extent to which I hope, to which I worry about a truth that might be individual to me, about a way of being or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create for myself barriers between which I confine my life.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Yes, it is on this melancholy and radiant image that the curtain must be rung down. The ultimate end, awaited but never disked, the ultimate end is negligible.
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
You know the alternative: either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all powerful
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
Sky above, around, holding all earth in its embrace
The Nature of Things
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event'. it makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of a network of kisses, not of stones"
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world
The Picture of Dorian Gray
No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Passion makes one think in a circle
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight-rope
The Picture of Dorian Gray
We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place
The Picture of Dorian Gray
All of the misfortunes of mankind came from not stating things in clear terms.
The Plague, Albert Camus
From time to time, joy should reward those whose desires are circumscribed by mankind and its meagre and terrible love
The Plague, Albert Camus
Of course a man should fight for the victims. But if he ceases to love anything else what is the point in fighting?
The Plague, Albert Camus
Rieux said firmly that there was no shame in choosing happiness. "Yes" said Rambert. "But there may be shame in being happy all by oneself". Rieux who had said nothing up to now, remarked without turning his head that if Rambert wanted to share the misfortunes of mankind he would never again have time for happiness. You had to choose.
The Plague, Albert Camus
The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorises itself to kill.
The Plague, Albert Camus
This world without love was like a dead world and that there always comes a time when one grows tired of prisons, work and courage, and yearns for the face of another human being and the wandering, affectionate heart.
The Plague, Albert Camus
We cannot make a gesture in this world without taking the risk of bringing death
The Plague, Albert Camus
Absolute good and absolute evil, if the necessary logic is applied, both demand the same degree of passion.
The Rebel, Camus
Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the world a sense of direction, while it is really nihilist itself, in so far as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning; "Every church is a stone rolled on to the tomb of the man-god, it tries to prevent the resurrection by force". Nietzsche's paradoxical but significant conclusion is that God has been killed by Christianity, in that Christianity has secularised the sacred.
The Rebel, Camus
Even virtue unites with crime in times of anarchy
The Rebel, Camus
Fraternity is only communism in its Sunday best
The Rebel, Camus
From the moment that man submits god to moral judgement, he kills him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God? At this point are we not in the realm of absurdity.
The Rebel, Camus
God has been dematerialised and reduced to the theoretical existence of moral principles
The Rebel, Camus
God is dead, but as Stirner predicted, but the morality of principles in which the memory of God exists is still preserved.
The Rebel, Camus
If nothing is true, if the world is without order, then nothing is forbidden; to prohibit an action, there must in fact be a standard of values and an aim. But at the same time, nothing is authorised; there must also be values and aims in order to choose another course of action. Absolute domination by the law does not present liberty, but no more does absolute anarchy. The sum total of every possibility does not amount to liberty, but no more does absolute anarchy. The sum total of every possibility does not amount to liberty, but to attempt the impossible amounts to slavery. Chaos is also a form of servitude. Freedom exists only in a world where what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible. Without law there is no freedom. If fate is not guided by superior values, if chance is king, then there is nothing but the step in the dark and the appalling freedom of the blind.
The Rebel, Camus
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity
The Rebel, Camus
Judgements are based on what is, with reference to what should be - the kingdom of heaven, eternal concepts, or moral imperatives. But what should be does not exist; and this world cannot be judged in the name of nothing
The Rebel, Camus
Morality is stronger than tyrants, it has in fact, just killed Louis XVI
The Rebel, Camus
Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination.
The Rebel, Camus
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and power. It is, in its essence, imperialist.
The Rebel, Camus
When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and preserve their faith, and that is to die for them
The Rebel, Camus
A good man may not find old age easy to bear if he's poor, but a bad man won't be at peace with himself even if he is rich
The Republic
For just as poets are fond of their own poems, and father of their own children, so money makers become devoted to money, not only because like other people they find it useful, but because it's their own creation
The Republic
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
The Scarlet Letter
Death came to see me this morning. We played chess together
The Seventh Seal
If all is imperfect in this imperfect world then love is most imperfect
The Seventh Seal
Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses? Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles?
The Seventh Seal
No man can live faced with dread knowing everything's nothingness. Most people think neither of Death nor of nothingness
The Seventh Seal
We must make an idol of our fear, and that fear we shall call God
The Seventh Seal
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return, the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy and only what is heavy has value
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
On the surface, an intelligible lie, underneath, the unintelligible truth.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
What is vertigo, fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"
The Usual Suspects
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he never existed, and just like that, he was gone.
The Usual Suspects
Life is the shit that happens when waiting for moments that never come
The Wire
On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain", Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine... Well, because it's awesome.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Young man untroubled by melancholy, fair as an Italian sun, take good care of your fine carelessness
Theodore Faullain de Banville
Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses
Thomas Aquinas
The value of the idea lies in the using of it
Thomas Edison
A novel is an impression not an argument
Thomas Hardy
Time changes everything, except something within us which is always surprised by change
Thomas Hardy
A man's conscience and his judgement is the same thing: and as the judgement, so also the conscience, may be erroneous
Thomas Hobbes
True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood
Thomas Hobbes
I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark
Thomas Hobbes (last words before death)
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries
Thomas Mann
We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life. But the beginning and end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events.
Thomas Mann
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults
Thomas Szasz
If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget
Thomas Szasz
Ah my brother, have you never yet seen a virtue turn upon itself and stab itself? Man is something that must be overcome: and for that reason you must love your virtues - for you will perish by them
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
As long as men have existed, man has enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Henceforward nothing evil shall come out of you, except it be the evil that comes form the conflict of your virtues
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I have at all times written things with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are. In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In some the heart ages first and in others the spirit
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In truth, I have often laughed at the weaklings who think themselves good because their claws are blunt! You should aspire to the virtue of the pillar: the higher it rises, the fairer and more graceful it grows, but inwardly harder and able to bear more weight.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Just look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying still
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Neither in the incomprehensible nor in the irrational can you be at home
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The voice of beauty speaks softly: it steals into only the most awakened souls.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
To the pure all things are pure. To the swine all things become swinish
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Truly I say to you: Unchanging good and evil does not exist! From out of themselves they must overcome themselves again and again
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Two primitive drives emerge as dominant in the natural kingdom (animals and humans): the desire for power and the emotion of fear. When Nietzsche came to understand fear as the feeling of the absence of power, he was left with a single motivating principle for all human actions: the will to power
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Why just in this direction thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward hope to reach an India, but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Why truth, and not rather untruth or indifference to truth? Because each particular life and being needs a fortress within which to preserve and protect itself and from which to reach out in search of aggrandisement and more power, and truth is this fortress. Or, as life says to thinking mankind: 'my will to power walks with the feet of your will to truth'.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
You want to be paid as well, you virtuous! Do you want reward for virtue and heaven for earth and eternity for your today?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Your love of your neighbour is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbour away from yourselves and would like to make a virtue of it: but I see through your 'selflessness'. The 'You' is older than the 'I'; the 'You' has been consecrated, but not yet the 'I': so man crowds towards his neighbour
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
All joy wants eternity
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - The Superman, the will to the Superman, the will to power and self-overcoming. Live dangerously! Amor fait, eternal recurrence, total affirmation of life. The great noontide. These are the slogans, the 'signs', by which Nietzsche surmounted his nihilism and resolved his crisis.
Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself
Tolstoy
They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
Tom Bodett
Don't confuse symmetry with balance
Tom Robbins
They told me that to make her fall in love, I had to make her laugh. But every time she laughs, I'm the one who falls in love
Tommaso Ferraris
For man the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage he thinks, is the world.
Tropic of Cancer
I wouldn't be able to distinguish between this phenomenon (watching two people have sex) and the rain falling or a volcano erupting. As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance. The machine is better to watch. And these two are like a machine which has slipped its cogs.
Tropic of Cancer
Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are always related to living.
Tropic of Cancer
Never despair, you can have a world without hope, but no despair
Tropic of Cancer
The thin is this, they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven't got, of course. There's just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it, you don't even look at it half the time. You get all burned up about nothing, about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It's so absolutely meaningless.
Tropic of Cancer
You don't know the meaning of passion. When you get an erection you think that you're passionate
Tropic of Cancer
The only thing more terrifying than the unknown is the distortion of the familiar
Unknown
Utopia is a state of mind
Unknown
What I know is enough for me
Unknown
Chastity is a man-made fetish invented by societies and religions for unknown reasons
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
If a woman in Shakespeare's day had Shakespeare's genius she would have inevitably killed herself. In fact, any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would have certainly gone crazed and shot herself
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flowers, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor sure.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
It seemed to her such nonsense inventing differences, when people were different enough without that
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
She saw the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as she came up with the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the lawn. He never noticed her. Some said he was dead; some said she was dead.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education
Walter Scott
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
William Blake
He who writes badly thinks badly
William Cobbett
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play
William Congreve
I am always of opinion with the learned, if they speak first
William Congreve
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more
William Cowper
War's a game which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at
William Cowper
A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.
William Inge
My experience is what I agree to attend to
William James (famous psychologist ). Psychotherapist David Reynolds also notes that if you're not paying attention to a personal problem - a recent break-up say - there's a meaningful sense in which you don't have a problem at all
I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it
William S. Burroughs
Hollywood is a trip through a sewer in a glass bottomed boat
Wilson Mizner
A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow
Winston Churchill
It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
Winston Churchill
But how can I be a logician before I'm a human being
Wittgenstein
The aim in Philosophy is the show the fly the way out of the fly bottole.
Wittgenstein
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen
Treachery and Violence are spears pointed at both ends - they wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies
Wuthering Heights
A person doesn't die when he should but when he can
100 Years of Solitude
When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?
1984 - there is a direct and intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives
Abba Eban
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation
Alain de Botton
Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing
Alain de Botton - On Love
Our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society
Alan Watts - The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
'the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion'
Albert Camus
An intellectual is someone who's mind watches itself
Albert Camus
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.
Albert Camus
If the world were clear art would not exist
Albert Camus
Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day
Albert Camus - The Fall
We are all exceptional cases. Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself
Albert Camus - The Fall
If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will say that I am a Jew
Albert Einstein
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind
Albert Einstein
Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking
Aldous Huxley
Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary
Aldous Huxley - Island
Being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand
Aldous Huxley- Brave New World
You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - he's free again
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world: there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more
Alexandre Dumas
To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor
Alexis Carrel - Man, The Uknown
If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach
Alfred Hitchcock
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.
Alvin Toffler
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves and good fortune to others
Ambrose Bierce
Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine
Andrea Dworkin (American Feminist and Writer)
In war, it is necessary not only to be active but to seem active
Andrew Bonar Law
Technology happens. It's not good, its not bad. Is steel good or bad?
Andrew Grove
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people
Angela Carter
I still believe that people are really good at heart
Anne Frank
"Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige"
Birdman
A man's alter ego is nothing more than his favorite image
Catch me if you can
"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?"
Cloud Atlas
Life is a sexually transmitted disease
(graffiti found on the London Underground)
One may look at every system of morals in this light: it is "nature" therein which teaches to hate the too great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons, for immediate duties - it teaches the narrowing of perspectives and thus that stupidity is a condition of life and development
Beyond Good and Evil
One must renounce with bad taste of wishing you agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a "common good". The expression contradicts itself, that which can be common is always of small value
Beyond Good and Evil
One no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after one has communicated it
Beyond Good and Evil
Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning ourselves
Beyond Good and Evil
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible human things - reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
CS Lewis
Books think for me
Charles Lamb
The past is just a story we tell ourselves.
Her (movie)
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you will always find despair
Irvin Yalom - When Nietsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession
"We must believe in Free Will - we have no choice."
Isaac Singer (Being a determinist doesn't mean that the illusion of free will suddenly goes away. It can't).
Quando finisce la partita il re ed il pedone finiscono nella stessa scatola
Italian Proverb meaning, "When you finish the game, the king and pawn end up in the same box"
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say
Italy Calvino
I'm made as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore
Network
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be
Peter de Vries, also the title of a book
The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough
Rabindranath Tagore
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste (Never waste a good crisis)
Rahm Emanuel (American Politician)
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by god
Robert Browning
"I had a lover's quarrel with the world"
Robert Frost
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length
Robert Frost
I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down
Robert Frost
Argumentum ad novitatem
The logical fallacy that what is new is better
"The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again."
Ulysses S. Grant (preventing his men from cheering after Lee's surrender at Appomattox
I don't have a favourite colour, it's pretty much whatever you are wearing
Unknown
I fell in love with your should before I could even touch your skin, if that isn't true love then please tell me what is
Unknown
I have an infinite number of reasons to be happy
Unknown
If beauty were time, you'd be eternity
Unknown
If you are not paying for the product then you are the product
Unknown
It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty
Unknown
It's too bad you don't see what I se, if you did you'd smile and keep looking
Unknown
When you feel alone, just look at the spaces between your fingers, and remember that's where my fingers fit perfectly
Unknown
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new
Ursula K. Le Guin
"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
Valis
"Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere"
Vertigo
Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere.
Vertigo
Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy" Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy. This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon, laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g. you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him.
Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Suffering in an of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by a lack of meaning and purpose
Viktor Frankl
Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life.
Viktor Frankl
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark
Virginia Wolf - To the Lighthouse
As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeons with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can
Virginia Woolf
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hand of the Headmaster himself a highly distinguished prize
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance...a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into intellectual freedom of which great writings are born
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture. That dream, then, of sharing, completing, finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
She wanted to go straight up to him and say, 'Mr Carmichael!' Then he would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it, said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay' - no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its marks.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
This was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into a distant heather. She knew him in that way
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Through the short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of the flies, the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs McNab when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
This is no time for making new enemies
Voltaire, (on being asked to renounce the Devil, on his deathbed)
Private faces in public spaces are wider and nicer than public faces in private places
W. H. Auden
The cost of liberty is less than theorise of repression
WEB Du Bois
A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing
Warren Buffett
I'm gonna be frank, ok can I still be Garth
Wayne's World 2
Would you like to have dinner some night? Oh I like to have dinner every night
Wayne's World 2
I used to think all poets were Byronic, they're mostly wicked as a ginless tonic and wild as pension plans
Wendy Cope
A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste
Whitney Balliett
"Between grief and nothingness, I'll take nothingness."
William Faulkner
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
William Faulkner
Nothing is so impenetrable as a laughter in a language you don't understand
William Golding
Russia can be an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both
Zbigniew Brzezinski
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue
Zeno
The most dangerous man in America is Walt Disney because he generates hope and in turn generates rage
Theodor Adorno
"It was like pistol whipping a blind kid"
Tropic Thunder
"To be a moron, to be moronical. To be the dumbest mother ****er who ever lived."
Tropic Thunder
I know who I am! I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!
Tropic Thunder
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life
Herbert Asquith
"Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
Interpreter or Maladies
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."
Jane Eyre
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, and what we mean we say, and what we would, we know
The Buried Life
He's dead? Who did it? Cancer. Everybody's dead Mr Sheeran
The Irishman
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"
Bladerunner
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul
The Spectator
"In '87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to be Square", a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself. Hey Paul..."
American Psycho
"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there."
American Psycho
"Here's looking at you kid"
Casablanca
"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
Casablanca
"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
Casablanca
"We'll always have Paris"
Casablanca
I am the last barman poet. I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make. Americans getting stinky on something I stir or shake. The sex on the beach, the schnapps made from peach, The Velvet Hammer, the Alabama Slamma! I make things with juice and froth: the Pink Squirrel, the 3-Toed Sloth. I make drinks so sweet and snazzy: The Iced Tea, The Kamikaze, The Orgasm, The Death Spasm, The Singapore Sling, The Dingaling. America you've just been devoted to every flavor I got. But if you want to got loaded, why don't you just order a shot? Bar is open
Cocktail
"Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary."
Dead Poets Society
"You had my curiosity. But now you have my attention."
Django Unchained
SEAN: So if I asked you about art you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that. If I asked you about women you'd probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you'd probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? "Once more into the breach, dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like! God put an angel on earth just for you...who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. I look at you; I don't see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my ****in' life apart. You're an orphan right? Do you think I'd know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can't learn anything from you I can't read in some ****in' book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't wanna do that, do you, sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
Good Will Hunting
The only exciting thing about living in 2002 is that it's a palindrome
Lady Bird
"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
Sunset Boulevard
"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."
The Alchemist
I'm the Dude, so that's what you call me. That or, uh His Dudeness, or uh Duder, or El Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.
The Big Lebowski
This is a very complicated case Maude. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous
The Big Lebowski
But what heads the body and reigns over it like a king
The Nature of Things
"If you're a bird, I'm a bird."
The Notebook
I lived uncertain, I die doubtful
Aristotle
The whole is more than the sum of the parts
Aristotle
"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!"
Auntie Mame
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly Roy"
Bladerunner
When you look at someone through rose coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags
Bojack Horseman
We're on a mission from god
The Blues Brothers
My life will be sour grapes and ashes without you
Daisy Ashford
TV - we call it a medium because nothings well done
Ace Goodman
It is as natural to die as it is to be born
Francis Bacon - Of Death
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean
The Education of Henry Adams
As each man day and night strives harder than the next to climb atop the pyramid of power. It is largely the dread of death on which these open wounds of life thrive and are fed
The Nature of Things
Nothing I wrote in the thirties saved one Jew from Auschwitz
W. H. Auden
The test of good prose is that the reader does not notice it anymore than a man looking through a window at a landscape notices the glass
W. H. Auden
Choose designer lingerie, in the vain hope of kicking some life back into a dead relationship. Choose handbags, choose high-heeled shoes, cashmere and silk, to make yourself feel what passes for happy. Choose an iPhone made in China by a woman who jumped out of a window and stick it in the pocket of your jacket fresh from a South-Asian firetrap. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand others ways to spew your bile across people you've never met. Choose updating your profile, tell the world what you had for breakfast and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, desperate to believe that you don't look as bad as they do. Choose live-blogging, from your first wank till your last breath; human interaction reduced to nothing more than data. Choose ten thing you never knew about celebrities who've had surgery. Choose screaming about abortion, choose rape jokes, slut-shaming, revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny. Choose 9/11 never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews. Choose a zero-hour contract and a two hour journey to work, and choose the same for your kids, only worse, and maybe tell yourself that it's better that they never happened. And then sit back and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody's ****ing kitchen. Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you'd done it all differently. Choose never learning from your own mistakes. Choose watching history repeat itself. Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get, rather than what you always hoped for. Settle for less and keep a brave face on it. Choose disappointment and choose losing the ones you love then as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you can see that one day in the future, piece by piece they will be all gone and there will be nothing left of you to call alive or dead. Choose your future, Veronica. Choose life
T2 Trainspotting
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man
The Big Lebowski
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning —— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"
The Great Gatsby
Body and mind are born together and they mature together and grow old together too
The Nature of Things
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
The Picture of Dorian Grey
"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
The Sound and The Fury
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Ulysses
Death is only a horizon, and a horizon is only the limit of our sight
Unknown
The nature of God is a circle of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere
Unknown
