Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No matter how good somebody's life looks from the outside, you can be sure there's something about it you wouldn't want to have in your life.
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.
What could be more interesting than thinking of mysterious happenings, finding the answers to intriguing questions, and making up new worlds?
When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.
Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.
A mere ape in our world may be a scholar in its own, and the low life of any beast may be a source of deep satisfaction for the beast itself.
I don't trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.
Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.
Hey, this is it—right now!—the time when you find out who you are and what you can do. And how will you ever know if you don't try new stuff?
Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect, and space is divided for him into dimensions; time, into past, present, and future.
If people are foolish, they are bound to mix the personality and the Truth, and to build a temple around the personality and form a religion.
I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.
The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.
I'll tell you something about tough times. They just about kill you, but if you decide to keep working at them, you'll find your way through.
A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.
Certain faults are necessary for the existence of the individual. We would resent it if old friends were to get rid of certain peculiarities.
Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.
If society gives up the right to impose the death penalty, then self-help will appear again and personal vendettas will be around the corner.
When intelligent and sensible people despise knowledge in their old age, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves.
Truth is a torch, but a huge one, and so it is only with blinking eyes what we all of us try to get past it, in actual terror of being burnt.
How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you'll soon discover what you're like.
To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.
People always fancy that we must become old to become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were.
The greatest happiness for the thinking person is to have explored the explorable and to venerate in equanimity that which cannotbe explored.
Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.
To pray rightly, you must make God your hope, stay, and all. Right prayer sees nothing substantial or worth being concerned about except God.
I'm doing what I like, why wouldn't I be happy? So what if it's not perfect, I don't believe in perfection. Maybe happy's as good as it gets.
This kind of collective society - giving to each according to his need - existed in Africa not only before Karl Marx, but also before Europe.
Though ye loue not to bye the pyg in the poke,Yet snatche ye at the poke, that the pyg is in,Not for the poke, but the pyg good chepe to wyn.
You get a compound fracture in Colorado where I live, and you can probably be in a hospital within a matter of hours, certainly within a day.
If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
There was a loud cough from the man on the stand. I replaced My Magic Mirror carefully on his tray, gave him a cheesy smile, and went my way.
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.
We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.
Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.
Our body is a well-set clock, which keeps good time, but if it be too much or indiscreetly tampered with, the alarm runs out before the hour.
Today there are no more irreconcilable enmities, because there are no more disinterested emotions: that's a good thing born from a bad thing.
Why are we doing all these handstands, backbends and arm balances? I don't know why we're doing them unless our lives are shaped and changed.
Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
Why is it that any time government takes over something for a few years, its assumed that people are too incompetent to do it for themselves?
I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room.
"A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come around; mine is always lit."
It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.