Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.
The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.
Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don't necessarily know how to obtain happiness.
DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.
The right attitude toward any negative state begins with understanding that its only authority over you is a direct reflection of your attitude towards it.
There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.
You Americans have the loveliest wine in the world, you know, but you don't realize it. You call them domestic and that's enough to start trouble anywhere.
Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.
No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes, Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes; Now, although the room grows chilly, I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy.
A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.
Vlad decided that teachers' ideas were a lot like bunches of garlic-intriguing from afar, but up close sadly sickening and, if you weren't careful, DEADLY.
There's nothing you can do, Sirus. No one can do this for me, and no one can swoop in and rescue me every time I'm challenged. I have to do this on my own.
He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.
And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.
The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is.
There is no possible excuse for a guarded lie. Enthusiastic and impulsive people will sometimes falsify thoughtlessly, but equivocation is malice prepense.
Oh, the solitariness of sin! There is nothing like it, except, perhaps, the solitariness of death. In that isolation none can reach you, none can feed you.
Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.
I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone.
In common discourse we denominate persons and things according to the major part of their character; he is to be called a wise man who has but few follies.
If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.
She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
For me, there's nothing sexier than a woman who can argue me into the ground and outsmart me...a woman who knows her own mind and isn't afraid to speak it.
Fool of a Took!" he growled. "This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking-party. Throw yourself in next time, and then you will be no further nuisance.
The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, For none now live who remember it.
I am essentially optimistic. Being alive is incredible. Life is extraordinary and beautiful. It can be hard and sad and terrifying, but it's all we've got.
I'll miss it until the day I die, and I'm convinced to this day that I can get on a horse and jump a course of fences satisfactorily. It doesn't leave you.
The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.
Cynics will say there are no good people out there. And if you read the papers and watch TV news you could be convinced of that. But there are good people.
Aren't you something," Grandma said. "I never saw a midget up close." "Little person," Briggs said. "And I never saw anyone as old as you up close, either.
You deserved to get run over. And besides, I barely tapped you. The only reason you broke your leg was because you panicked and tripped over your own feet.
'Plum's are probably the funniest, but all the books have their own degree of humor. But if you're hooked into 'Ranger,' you're reading it for the romance.
A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.
I hope being honest about my experiences and contextualizing them empowers young women to step into their truths, tell their own stories, and live visibly.
Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.
Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.