Thomas Carlyle

1. "Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity."
2. "After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books."
3. “Alas the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.”
4. “All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been, it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the choicest possessions of men.”
5. “A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”
6. "A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things."
7. "A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man."
8. “A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.”
9. ”A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.”
10. "A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads."
11. "A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus."
12. “A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”
13. “A well-written life is almost as rare as well-spent one.”
14. "Clever men are good, but they are not the best."
15. "Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows."
16. "Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being."
17. "Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer."
18. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone."
19. "Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries."
20. ”Endurance is patience concentrated.”
21. "Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work."
22. ”Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!”
23. "Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one."
24. “Every noble work is at first impossible.”
25. "Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do."
26. “Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,—Necessity and Free Will.”
27. "Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death."
28. "For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad."
29. “For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.”
30. “For the eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."”
31. "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains."
32. “Genius … means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble.”
33. "Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!"
34. "Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men."
35. “Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among Mankind.”
36. “He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.”
37. "He that can work is born to be king of something."
38. “High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.”
39. "History is the distillation of rumor."
40. “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
41. “I don't pretend to understand the Universe--it's a great deal bigger than I am.”
42. “If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that.”
43. “If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?”
44. ”If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stem command.”
45. “If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of him.”
46. "If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated reading deserves to be read at all."
47. "If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded."
48. “I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.”
49. "I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country."
50. "Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!"
51. "Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding."
52. "Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere."
53. “In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.”
54. "In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched."
55. “In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.”
56. “In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.”
57. “In idleness there is a perpetual despair.”
58. "In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment."
59. “In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.”
60. ”It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.”
61. "It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale."
62. “It is not a lucky word, this same impossible; no good comes of those that have it so often in their mouth.”
63. “It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.”
64. ”It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.”
65. “Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless?”
66. "Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man"
67. "Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy."
68. ”Let me have my own way in exactly everything, and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.”
69. “Let Time and Chance combine, combine!Let Time and Chance combine!The fairest love from heaven above,That love of yours was mine,My Dear!That love of yours was mine.”
70. "Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s."
71. “Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.”
72. “Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.”
73. ”Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.”
74. “Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.”
75. "Music is well said to be the speech of angels."
76. “My whinstone house my castle is;I have my own four walls.”
77. "Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid."
78. “Nature admits no lie.”
79. “Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, the parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?”
80. "No age seemed the age of romance to itself."
81. "No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment."
82. “No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!”
83. "No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."
84. "No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses."
85. "No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad."
86. "No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors."
87. "No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves."
88. "Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world."
89. "Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight."
90. "Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward."
91. "Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom."
92. "Oh, give us the man who sings at his work."
93. “One life,—a little gleam of time between two Eternities.”
94. "One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO."
95. "Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others."
96. ”Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.”
97. “Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
98. "Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility."
99. "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand."
100. "Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world."
101. "Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction."
102. “Reform, like charity, must begin at home. Once well at home, how will it radiate outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak and work; kindling ever new light by incalculable contagion; spreading, in geometric ratio, far and wide; doing good only, wherever it spreads, and notevil.”
103. "Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong."
104. "Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious."
105. "Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is."
106. “Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.”
107. “Silence is more eloquent than words.”
108. ”Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.”
109. ”So here hath been dawning another blue day: Think, wilt thou let it slip useless away? Out of eternity this new day is born; Into eternity at night 'twill return.”
110. “Speech is too often not . . . the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought.”
111. “Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.”
112. "The actual well seen is ideal."
113. "The archenemy is the arch stupid!"
114. “The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.”
115. “The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.”
116. "The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything."
117. “That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.”
118. ”The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin.”
119. "The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope."
120. "The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough."
121. “The eye of the intellect “sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.”
122. “The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.”
123. "The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then."
124. “The fraction of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceives me, unity itself divided by zero will give infinity.”
125. “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”
126. “The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of becoming.”
127. “The great silent men! Looking around on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble, silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs; which must soon wither and be no forest.”
128. "The heart always sees before than the head can see."
129. "The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money."
130. "The Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into."
131. ”The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.”
132. ”The king is the man who can.”
133. ”The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; he believes for himself, not for another.”
134. "The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self."
135. "The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever."
136. "The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception."
137. "The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall."
138. “There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of sort, rhymed or unrhymed.”
139. "There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems."
140. "The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love."
141. "The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."
142. ”The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.”
143. “The true University of these days is a collection of books.”
144. “This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”
145. "Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, --till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another."
146. "Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope."
147. “Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”
148. "Variety is the condition of harmony."
149. ”Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.”
150. "We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer."
151. “What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?”
152. "What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books."
153. “What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.”
154. "When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances."
155. “Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?”
156. "Wonderful ''Force of Public Opinion!'' We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of ''influence'' it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?"
157. "Wonder is the basis of worship."
158. "Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance -- the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it ;better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen."
159. “Work is the grand cure for all maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind - honest work, which you intend getting done.”
160. “Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.”

Dostoyevsky

1. "A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes."
2. “All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.”
3. “But what can be done about it if the single and direct purpose of any intelligent person is to chatter, that is to say the deliberate pouring of emptiness into the void.”
4. “If you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may say with confidence that he is a good man.”
5. "If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love."
6. “If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
7. ”If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For, then, your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love.“
8. “If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.”
9. “If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immortal, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.”
10. "I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever..."
11. “Innovators and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.”
12. "I think if the devil doesn't exist, then man has created him. He has created him in his own image and likeness." "Just as man created God, then?" observed Alyosha.”
13. “It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them -- the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
14. “It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”
15. "Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God."
16. “Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.”
17. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people, too, perhaps a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it—at that very moment you will reach and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”
18. “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”
19. ”Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.”
20. “Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.”
21. “Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.”
22. “Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.”
23. “Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else… . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!”
24. “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
25. “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
26. “The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”
27. “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
28. “The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying- lying to others and to yourself.”
29. ”There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.”
30. “There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if we have only one good memory left in our hearts, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”
31. “Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here."”
32. “We have come almost to look upon real life as an effort, almost as hardwork, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books.”
33. “With love one can live even without happiness.”
34. “Without some goal and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.”

Henry Louis Mencken

1. “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
2. ”A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.”
3. ”All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”
4. “A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.”
5. ”And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.”
6. “An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. Enchantment may be a state of rapture and ecstasy in which the soul comes to the foreground, and the literal concerns of survival and daily preoccupation at least momentarily fade into the background.”
7. ”An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
8. “Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”
9. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
10. ”Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”
11. ”Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”
12. ”Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
13. “Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.”
14. "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
15. “Every man is his own hell.”
16. ”Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats”
17. “Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.”
18. ”Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
19. ”For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong.”
20. “I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.”
21. ”If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.”
22. “Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.”
23. ”Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.”
24. “In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal.”
25. ”Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”
26. “I read them all, sometimes with shivers of puzzlement and sometimes with delight, but always calling for more. I began to inhabit a world that was two-thirds letterpress and only one-third trees, fields, streets and people. I acquired round shoulders, spindly shanks, and a despondent view of humanity. I read everything that I could find in English, taking in some of it but boggling the rest.”
27. “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.”
28. ”It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”
29. ”It is evident that scepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.”
30. “It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume... that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.”
31. ”Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.”
32. ”Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.”
33. "Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
34. ”Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.”
35. ”Men become civilised, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”
36. “Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”
37. “Nature abhors a moron.”
38. "Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed."
39. ”No man ever quite believes in any other man.”
40. ”No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”
41. “No one in this world, so far as I know... has ever lost money by under estimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people.”
42. “No one blames a man for believing that his wife is beautiful, but it is impossible to avoid disgust in the presence of one who believes that he has an immortal soul of some vaguely gaseous nature and that it will continue to exist four hundred million years after he has been shoveled away...”
43. ”Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”
44. “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
45. “Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”
46. “Psychology: The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.”
47. "Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
48. ”Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.”
49. “Temptation is a woman's weapon and a man's excuse.”
50. ”The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.”
51. “The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”
52. “The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.”
53. “The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.”
54. ”The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.”
55. “The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once -- and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.”
56. ”The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.”
57. “The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.”
58. “The proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good.”
59. “The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.”
60. “There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
61. “There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”
62. “There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.”
63. “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
64. “The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.”
65. “The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”
66. "To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia--to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess."
67. “What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match.”
68. ”We are here and now. Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine.”
69. "We are a nation of communities ...a brillant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad peaceful sky."
70. "Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."

Breaking the mold

“There never was such beauty in another man.
Nature made him, and then broke the mould.”

Ludovico Ariosto

Fairy Tale

“Every man's life is a fairy-tale written by God's fingers.”

Hans Christian Andersen

No right

“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”

Ansel Adams

Have mercy Beloved

“Beloved, show me the way out of this prison.
Make me needless of both worlds.
Pray, erase from mind all
that is not You.

Have mercy Beloved,
though I am nothing but forgetfulness,
You are the essence of forgiveness.
Make me needless of all but You.”

Abil Kheir, Shaikh Abu Saeed.

The sin

“The sin, then, consists not in desiring a woman, but in consent to the desire, and not the wish for whoredom, but the consent to the wish is damnation.”

Pierre Abelard

Ideology

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Edward Abbey

Armor

Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.

Laurence J. Peter

Armor

Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.

Laurence J. Peter

Be still

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

D. H. Lawrence

Unpunished

No good deed goes unpunished.

Clare Booth Luce, in H. Faber, The Book of Laws, 1980

J.R.R. Tolkien

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost.”

“And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world.”

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least.”

“Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

“Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end.”

"For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. It is possible, I think, to be moved by the power of myth and yet to misunderstand the sensation, to ascribe it wholly to something else that is also present: to metrical art, style, or verbal skill."

“Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, "a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all." Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.”


" 'He deserves death'.
'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them ? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.' "


“He should not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

“He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.”

“His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.”

"I believe that legends and myth are largely made of truth,and indeed present aspects of it that can only be perceived in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes ofthis kind were discovered and must always reappear."


“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”


“I don´t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water seem all accursed. But so our path is laid.”

“Yes, that´s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn´t be here at all, if we´d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it´s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that´s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have just landed in them, usually – their paths were lead that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn´t. And if they had, we shouldn´t know, because they´d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call s good end. You can know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren´t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we´ve fallen into?”

“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don´t know. And that´s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you´re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don´t know. And you don´t want them to.”

“No, sir, of course not. (…) And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We´ve got – you´ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we´re in the same tale still! It´s going on. Don´t the great tales never end?”

“No, they never end as tales,” said Frodo. “But the people in them come, and go, when their part´s ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.”

“And then we can have some rest and some sleep,” said Sam. “And I mean just that, Mr. Frodo. I mean plain ordinary rest, and sleep, and waking up to a morning´s work in the garden. I´m afraid that´s all I´m hoping for all the time. All the big important plans are not for my sort. Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs ot tales, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: “Let´s hear about Frodo and the Ring!” And they´ll say: “Yes, that´s one of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn´t he, dad?” “Yes, my buy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that´s saying a lot.””

“It´s saying a lot too much,” said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in such places since Sauron came to Middle Earth. To Sam, it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. “Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you´ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn´t they put in more of his talk, dad? That´s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn´t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”

“Now, Mr. Frodo,” said Sam, “you shouldn´t make fun. I was serious.”

“So was I,” said Frodo, “and so am I. We´re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it´s all too likely that some will say at this point: “Shut the book now, dad; we don´t want to read anymore.””

“Maybe,” said Sam, “but I wouldn´t be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks he´s the hero or the villain?”

”I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
Band wind upon my hair.”


"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."

“It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish.”

“So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending.”

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

“Still round the corner there may wait,
A new road or a secret gate.”

“Surely you do not disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”

“The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”

“The wise speak only of what they know.”

”The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is mingled with grief, love grows perhaps the greater.”

“What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”

Ernest Hemingway

1. "Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition(the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."
2. ”All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”
3. "All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
4. "All things truly wicked start from an innocence."
5. “Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
6. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
7. “Courage is grace under Pressure.”
8. ”Cowardice . . . is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”
9. “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”
10. “Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.”
11. "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"
12. “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”
13. ”If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
14. ”If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
15. "If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."
16. "I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success."
17. “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
18. "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
19. "In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused."
20. “In order to write about life, first you must live it!”
21. ”In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don't understand that, to hell with them.”
22. "I only know that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
23. “It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes.... No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”
24. ”It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of their trade is to lie or invent and they will lie when they are drunk, or to themselves, or to strangers. They often lie unconsciously and then remember the lies with great remorse. If they knew all other writers were liars, too, it would cheer them up.”
25. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pride and pleasure has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race.”
26. "Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
27. "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
28. ”Never mistake motion for action.”
29. “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
30. ”. . . that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
31. “One cat just leads to another.”
32. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with the.”
33. “That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”
34. “The art of the torero is] the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.”
35. "The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other."
36. “The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.”
37. "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector."
38. "The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."
39. "There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and, because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."
40. "There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
41. "There's no one thing that is true. They're all true."
42. “The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. Those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
43. "The world is a fine place worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."
44. "The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it."
45. ”What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
46. ”When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
47. “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
48. "You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."
49. “You must be prepared to work always without applause.”
50. “You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way. It is only by showing both sides - 3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to.”

Publius Syrus

1. A guilty conscience never feels secure.
2. "A WoMaN EiThEr lOvEs oR HaTeS."
3. Better be ignorant of a matter than half know it.
4. “Beware the fury of a patient man.”
5. Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocency.
6. Do not care how many, but whom, you please.
7. Every madman thinks all other men are mad.
8. He hurts the absent who quarrels with a drunken man.
9. He hurts the good who spares the bad.
10. He sleeps well who knows not that he sleeps ill.
11. He is truly wise who gains wisdom from another's mishap.
12. He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion.
13. He who overlooks a fault, invites the commission of another.
14. “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.”
15. It is better to learn late than never.
16. It is easy for men to talk one thing and think another.
17. It is not every question that deserves an answer.
18. It is sometimes expedient to forget what you know.
19. It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.
20. Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid.
21. Man has been lent, not given, to life.
22. O life! long to the wretched, short to the happy.
23. One man's wickedness may easily become all men's curse.
24. Straining breaks the bow, and relaxation relieves the mind.
25. The anger of lovers renews the strength of love.
26. “The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.”
27. The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
28. The highest condition takes rise in the lowest.
29. "To do two things at once is to do neither."
30. You must make a lover angry if you wish him to love.
[Lat., Cogas amantem irasci, amare si velis.]
31. You need not hang up the ivy branch over the wine that will sell.
32. “You should hammer your iron when it is glowing hot.”

History of the world

“It is said that each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of noontide, the slow, poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.”

Roger Zelazny

Who wants to live forever?

“Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever?
Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all?
This is a miracle; and that no more.”

Edward Young

Interesting

“It's interesting to live when you are angry.”

Yevstushenko, Yevgueny.

Accuracy

“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.”

Xenophon

Excess of grief

“Excess of grief for the deceased is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.”

Xenophon

Nothing is stable

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

Socrates

Absurd

This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

Bertrand Russell

Never explain

Never explain-- your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

Elbert Hubbard

Plutarch

1. “All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.”
2. ”A lover's soul lives in the body of his mistress.”
3. “Arms and laws do not flourish together.”
4. "A sage thing is timely silence, and better than any speech."
5. “Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.”
6. “But if any man undertake to write a history that has to be collected from materials gathered by observation and the reading of works not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him, undoubtedly, it is in the first place and above all things most necessary to reside in some city of good note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and upon inquiry may hear and inform himself of such particulars as, having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many things, even those which it can least dispense with.”
7. ”Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.”
8. “Euripides was wont to say, “Silence is an answer to a wise man.””
9. "Fate leads him who follows it, and drags him who resist."
10. “For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.”
11. “For water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow.”
12. “Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.”
13. “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”
14. "Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends."
15. “Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of this world."
16. "Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech."
17. “The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.”
18. “The law speaks too softly to be heard amidst the din of arms.”
19. "The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune."
20. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.”
21. “Themistocles said that a man’s discourse was like to a rich Persian carpet, the beautiful figures and patterns of which can be shown only by spreading and extending it out; when it is contracted and folded up, they are obscured and lost.”
22. "The soul, being eternal, after death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about old age is that the soul's memory of the other world grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body, until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to higher things."
23. “The most perfect soul, says Heraclitus, is a dry light, which flies out of the body as lightning breaks from a cloud.”
24. “The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.”
25. "Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly."
26. “To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.”

Charles Baudelaire

1. “Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route.... It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.”
2. “Are they blue, gray or green? Mysterious eyes(as if in fact you were looking through a mist)in alternation tender, dreamy, grimto match the shiftless pallor of the sky.That's what you're like- these warm white afternoonswhich make the ravished heart dissolve in tears,the nerves, inexplicably overwrought,outrage the dozen mind.Not always, though-sometimesyou're like the horizon when the sunignites our cloudy autumn-how you glow!A sodden countryside in sudden rout,turned incandescent by a changing wind.Dangerous woman-demoralizing days!Will I adore your killing frost as much,and in that implacable winter, when it comes,discover pleasures sharper than iron and ice? “
3. “Conceive me as a dream of stone:my breast, where mortals come to grief,is made to prompt all poets' love,mute and noble as matter itself.With snow for flesh, with ice for heart,I sit on high, an unguessed sphinxbegrudging acts that alter forms;I never laugh, I never weep.In studious awe the poets broodbefore my monumental poseaped from the proudest pedestal,and to bind these docile lovers fastI freeze the world in a perfect mirror:The timeless light of my wide eyes.”
4. “Do you come from on high or out of the abyss,O Beauty? Godless yet divine, your gazeindifferently showers favor and shame,and yet some have likened you to wine. Your eyes reflect the sunset and the dawn;your scatter perfumes like a windy night;your kisses are a drug, your mouth the urndispensing fear to heroes, fervor to boys. Whether spawned by hell or sprung from the stars,Fate like a spaniel follows at your heel;you sow haphazard fortune and despair,ruling all things, responsible for none. You walk on corpses, Beauty, undismayed,and Horror coruscates among your gems;Murder, one of your dearest trinkets, throbson your shameless belly: make it dance! Dazzled, the dayfly flutters round your wick,crackles, flares, and cries: I bless this torch!The pining lover for his lady swoonslike a dying man adoring his own tomb. Who cares if you come from paradise or hell,appalling Beauty, artless and monstrous scourge,if only your eyes, your smile or your foot revealthe Infinite I love and have never known? Come from Satan, come from God - who cares,Angel or siren, rhythm, fragrance, light,provided you transform - O my one queen!This hideous universe, this heavy hour? “
5. “Even when she walks she seems to dance!Her garments writhe and glisten like long snakesobedient to the rhythm of the wandsby which a fakir wakens them to grace. Like both the desert and the desert skyinsensible to human suffering,and like the ocean's endless labyrinthshe shows her body with indifference. Precious minerals are her polished eyes,and in her strange symbolic natureangel and sphinx unite,where diamonds, gold, and steel dissolve into one light,shining forever, useless as a star,the sterile woman's icy majesty.”
6. “I am like the king of a rainy countryRich, and yet powerless, young and yet most oldWho, distrustful of the bows his tutors makeSits bored among his dogs as with his other beastsNothing can lift his spirits, neither hawk nor gameThe dying subjects gathered to his balcony.The grotesque ballad of his best-loved foolNo more distracts him in this sickness cruel.His lilied bed is changed into a tomb;The ladies of his court all lords might loveAnd yet they can no longer find shameless attireTo draw a smile from their young, wasted sire.The alchemist who made him gold could notPurge from his soul this corrupt elementAnd in a blood bath, as in ancient Rome,Remembered by the mighty in their latter daysKnew not to warm this dazzled corpseWhere flows not blood but Lethe's waters green.”
7. ”I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.”
8. ´I prize the memory of the naked ageswhen Apollo relished gilding marble limbswhose agile-fleshed originals achievedwith neither ecstasy, fraud nor fearand was nursed by companionable sky,enjoying the health of a sublime machine.Cybele than, abundant in her yield,did not regard her sons as burdensome,but, tender-hearted she-wolf, graciouslysuckled the universe as her brown dugs.Lithe and powerful, a man deservedhis pride in beauties who called him their king-flawless fruit engendered without shame,whose ripened flash asked only to be tried!Today the poet eager to recallsuch human splendor, when visiting the siteswhere men and women show their nakednessmust feel a cold revulsion in his soulat the display of flesh he contemplates.How these deformities cry out for clothes!-wretched bodies, regular grotesques,runty, paunchy, flabby, scrawny, lame,brats whom Utility, a pitiless god,has swaddled in his brazen diapers!Look at the women - pale as tallow, gnawedand nourished by debauch - the girls who bearthe burden of their mothers' vice or wearthe hideous stigmas of fecundity!True, in our corruption we possessbeauties unrevealed to ancient times:countenances cankered by the heartand, so to speak, the charm of listlessness;but subtle thought they are, such artifactsof a belated muse will never keepour sickly race from offering to youthits truest homage; youth we worship still,its frank expression, its untroubled brow,its eyes as bright as water; sacred youththat shares - unconscious as a singing bird,a flower, or the blue sky's radiance -its song, its scent, its irresistible warmth!”
9. “It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.”
10. "It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten."
11. “Love is seated on the skull Of Humanity,And on this profane throne, With an impudent laugh,Gaily blows round bubbles That rise in the air,As if they wished to rejoin the worlds In the depths of the ether.”
12. "Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes utter confused words. Man walks through it among forests of symbols, which watch him with knowingeyes."
13. ”Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.”
14. “Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lusttorment our bodies and possess our minds,and we sustain our affable remorsethe way a beggar nourishes his liceOur sins are stubborn, our contrition lame;we want our scruples to be worth our while-how cheerfully we crawl back to the mire:with few cheap tears washing our stains away!Satan Trismegistus subtly rocksour ravished spirits on his wicked beduntil the precious metal of our willis leached out by this cunning alchemist:the Devil's hand directs our every move-the things we loathed become the things we love:day by day we drop though stinking shadesquite undeterred on our descent to Hell!Like a poor profligate who sucks and bitesthe withered breasts of some well-seasoned troll,we snatch in passing at clandestine joysand squeeze the oldest orange harder yet.Wriggling in our brains like a million worms,a demon demos holds its revels there,and when we breathe, the Lethe in our lungstrickles sighing on its secret course.If rape and arson, poison and the knifehave not yet stitched their ludicrous designsonto the banal buckram of our fates,it is because our souls lack enterprise!But here among the scorpions and the hounds,the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,in all the squalid zoo of vices,one is even uglier and fouler than the rest,although the least flamboyant of the lot;this beast would gladly undermine the earth.”
15. “The beloved was naked, and knowing my heart,had retained only her vibrant jewels,whose pageantry gave to her a rich and conquering airsuch as belonged, on langorous days, to Moorish concubines. This world radiant of metal and rockravishes me, and when its brightand mocking noise leaps in dance, I madly lovethose things in which sound is mixed with light. She lay thus, abandoned to love,and from the height of the couch, smiledcarelessly at my ardor that rose, deep and fragrant as the sea,mounting toward her as toward a pale cliff. Eyeing me like a tamed tiger,she posed with a vague and dreamy air,and candor, being joined to shamelessness,gave fresh charm to all her metamorphoses. Polished with oil, undulant like a swan,arm and leg, thigh and loinspassed before my serene and clairvoyant eyes;while her belly and breasts, fruits of my vine, Hovered, more seductive than Fallen Angels,to trouble the repose in which my soul lay,and to lure it from the crystal rock where,calm and solitary, it had been enthroned. I thought I saw the hips of Antiopejoined by a new design to a boyish torso,so that her figure thrust forth its pelvis--how superb the rouge on this brown and tawny complexion! --The lamp had resigned itself to dying.The hearth alone illuminated the room,and each time it heaved forth a flaming sigh,flooded her amber skin with blood!”
16. “Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.”
17. “Though your wicked eyebrows callYour nature into question(Unangelic's their suggestion,Witch whose eyes enthrall)> I adore you still -O foolish terrible emotion -Kneeling in devotionAs a priest to his idol will. Your undone braids concealDesert, forest scents:In your exotic countenanceLie secrets unrevealed. Over your flesh perfume driftsLike incense 'round a censor:Tantalizing dispenserOf evening's ardent gifts. No Philtres could competeWith your potent idleness:You've mastered the caressThat raises dead me to their feet. Your hips themselves are romancedBy your back and by your breasts:By your languid dalliance. Now and then, your appetite'sUncontrolled, unassuaged:Mysteriously enraged,You kiss me and you bite. Dark one, I am tornBy your savage ways,Then, soft as the moon, your gazeSees my tortured heart reborn. Beneath your satin shoe,Beneath your charming silken foot.My greatest joy I putMy genius and destiny, too. You bring my spirit back,Bringer of the light.Exploding color in the nightOf my Siberia so black.”
18. ”Today I felt pass over meA breath of wind from the wings of madness.”
19. “To the most lovely, the most dear,The Angel, and the deathless grailWho fill my heart with radiance clear -In immortality all hail.”
20. “We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.”
21. ”Your eyes are the cistern where my troubles drink.”

Gloria Steinem

1. “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.”
2. “I can't mate in captivity.”
3. "If men could menstruate. clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boastworthy, masculine event: Me would brag about how long and how much. Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands as Paul Newman Tampons, Muhammed Ali's Rope-a-Dope Pads, John Wayne Maxi Pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields - 'For Those Light Bachelor Days."
4. “Logic is in the eye of the logician.”
5. “The surest way to be alone is to get married.”
6. “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
7. ”The moment we find the reason behind an emotion the wall is breached, and the positive memories it has kept from us return too. That's why it pays to ask those painful questions. The answers can set you free.”
8. “Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
9. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”

'Tis all that Heaven allows

“All my past life is mine no more;
the flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o'er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

The time that is to come is not;
How can it then be mine?
The present moment's all my lot;
And that, as fast as it is got,
My love, is only thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
Falso hearts, and broken vows;
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
'Tis all that Heaven allows.”

John Wilmot

Into the blank of your mind

“Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. / Something will come to you.”

Richard Wilbur

I hate love

"Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

Rose Walker

Collective hunch

"What's reality anyway? Nothing but a collective hunch."

Jane Wagner

All you need to know

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats. 1795-1821
Ode on a Grecian Urn

Finish every day and be done with it

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day;
you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.


Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have often wondered ...

"I have often wondered how it is everyone loves himself more than the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than the opinions of others."

Aurelius, Marcus 121-80 AD, Roman Emperor Philosopher

When was I less?

I died a mineral, and became a plant.
I died a plant and rose an animal.
I died an animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Jalal-Uddin Rumi

Keynote

"Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilisation."

Henri Louis Bergson

No anxiety

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

Plato

Foolish thing

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

Anatole France

Made for another world

If I find in myself a desire that no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

C.S. Lewis 1898-1963

Carl Sandburg

1. “A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.”
2. ”And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?”
3. ”A woman is like a tea bag. It's only when she's in hot water that you realize how strong she is.”
4. ”COVER me over In dusk and dust and dreams.
Cover me over And leave me alone.
Cover me over, You tireless, great.
Hear me and cover me, Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams.”
5. "History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it."
6. “I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.”
7. “I TOO have a garret of old playthings. I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs. I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs. I have guns and a drum, a jumping-jack and a magic lantern. And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs. I too have a garret of old playthings.”
8. ”I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.”
9. “I will read ashes for you, if you ask me. / I will look on the fire and tell you from the gray lashes / And out of the red and black tongues and stripes, / I will tell how fire comes / And how fire runs far as the sea.”
10. “Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.”
11. “Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.”
12. “Nothing happens unless first a dream.”
13. "Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child."
14. “Our lives are like a candle in the wind.”
15. "Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."
16. “Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”
17. ”Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
18. “Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.”
19. "Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
20. “Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.”
21. “The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.”
22. ”The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.”
23. “There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere.”
24. "The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am."
25. “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”

Plotinus

1. “A sympathy pervades this single universe, like a single living creature, and the distant is near. . . Like parts lie not in contact but separated, with other parts between, yet by their likeness they feel sympathy . . and in a living and unified being there is no part so remote as not to be near, through the very nature that binds the living unity in sympathy.”
2. “Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”
3. "But myths, if they are really going to be myths, must separate in time the things of which they tell, and set apart from each other many realities which are together, but distinct in rank of powers, at points where rational discussions, also, make generations of things ungenerated, and themselves, too, separate things which are together; the myths, when they have taught us as well as they can, allow the man who has understood them to put together again that which they have separated."
4. “The power and nature of Soul encompasses heaven and guides it according to its will. To all this vast expanse, as far as it extends, it gives itself, and every interval, both large and small, is filled with Soul. . . Soul enlivens all things with its whole self and all Soul is present everywhere. . . And vast and diversified thought this universe is, it is one by the power of soul and a god because of soul. The sun is also a god, because ensouled, and the other stars, and if we ourselves partake of the Divine, this is the cause.”
5. “This All is universal power, of infinite extent and infinite in potency, a god so great that all his parts are infinite. Name any place, and he is already there.”
6. “This universe is a single living being embracing all living beings within it, and possessing a single Soul that permeates all its parts to the degree of their participation in it. Every part of this sensible universe is fully participant in its material aspect, and in respect of soul, in the degree to which it shares in the World Soul.”
7. “We are not separate from Being; we are in it.”

Albert Camus

1. "Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom."
2. “Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.”’
3. "...a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given."
4. "According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me. His response was that it hadn't washed away my sin for all that. I told him I didn't know what a sin was. All they had told me was that I was guilty. I was guilty, I was paying for it, and nothing more could be asked of me."
5. ”A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.”
6. ”All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.”
7. "An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual = one who splits himself in two. I like that. I am happy to be both (halves)."
8. “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
9. "A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images."
10. "Art does not tolerate reason."
11. "As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself---so like a brother, really---I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."
12. “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”
13. "A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them."
14. "At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."
15. "At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd."
16. ”Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
17. "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
18. "Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined."
19. ”But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”
20. “Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.”
21. “Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.”
22. “Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
23. "Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It is taking place everyday."
24. "Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
25. "Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic."
26. “Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified for having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble -- yes, gamble -- with a whole part of their life and their so-called "vital interests."”
27. "For he had played his part, fashioned his role. perfected one man's duty, which is to be happy. Not for long, no doubt. He had destroyed the obstacle, and this inner brother he had engendered in himself - what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact he had existed."
28. “Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.”
29. "Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship--never."
30. "From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible. And no doubt he would have continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each one of us would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and - together with fear - the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead."
31. ”How many crimes committed merely because their authors could not endure being wrong!”
32. ”I am well aware that an addiction to silk underwear does not necessarily imply that one's feet are dirty. None the less, style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema.”
33. "I don't want to be a genius - I have enough problems just trying to be a man."
34. "If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one."
35. "I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints."
36. "If it is true that the only paradises are those we have lost, I know what name to give the tender and inhuman something that dwells in me today."
37. "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."
38. “I have said that the world is absurd but I spoke too soon. All we can say is that this world in and of itself is not reasonable. What is absurd, though, is the conflict between this irrationality and man's desperate wish for intelligibility.”
39. "I know of only one duty, and that is to love."
40. "I love my country too much to be a nationalist."
41. "In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land."
42. "In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist."
43. "Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are."
44. ”Integrity has no need of rules.”
45. "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
46. "I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."
47. "It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore."
48. "It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all."
49. "It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning."
50. "Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched - just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance - so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life of happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set out acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned."
51. "Life can be magnificent and overwhelming- that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger, it would be almost easy to live."
52. “Life is absurd.”
53. "Life is the sum of all your choices."
54. “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.”
55. "Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears."
56. "More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other."
57. "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
58. “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
59. "Politics and the shape of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't concern themselves with politics."
60. "Punishment without judgment is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune."
61. “Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.”’
62. "Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."
63. "That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means."
64. ”The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.”
65. "The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
66. ”The absurd is sin without God.”
67. “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
68. "The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it."
69. "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
70. "The innocent is the person who explains nothing."
71. "The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind."
72. "The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression."
73. "There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born."
74. "There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral; namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them."
75. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."
76. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
77. "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One should imagine Sisyphus happy."
78. "The work of art is born of the intelligence`s refusal to reason the concrete."
79. "The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody."
80. “They now knew that if there is one thing which can always be desired and
sometimes obtained, it is human tenderness."
81. "Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
82. “Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”
83. "To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, an no-one in his right mind will believe this today."
84. "To be really realistic a description would have to be endless."
85. "To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well."
86. ”To know oneself, one should assert oneself.”
87. “Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”
88. “To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).
89. "To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred."
90. "True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person."
91. ”Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.”
92. "Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil."
93. "We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others."
94. "We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something. Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself."
95. "We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible."
96. "We cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all. Every man testifies to the crime of all the others - that is my faith and my hope."
97. "We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity."
98. "What is a rebel? A man who says no."
99. "When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter."
100. "Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and ''historical tasks'' is an actual or potential assassin."
101. "Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future."
102. “Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.”
103. “Without work life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies."
104. “You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.”
105. "You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."
106. “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”
107. “You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.”
108. ”You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”