Quotes by Writers - Page 39

We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
My body is a political battlefield.It is a place of war, of death and suffering, of triumph and victory, of damage and repair, of blood and tears and sweat.It is a place where memories go to find purpose for their existence.It is a place where humans cast all inhibitions aside to discover what exists at their very core.It is a place of growth wearing a mask of destruction.It is a challenge, not for the faint of heart, beckoning us to face it with eyes wide open.The only war is within. When you are ready to fight it, the field awaits.
Agnostic Zetetic
A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed; it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.
Charles Rosen
A warning to you both - choose to follow me or oppose me and I will kill you.-Connor Kenway
Oliver Bowden
My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.
David Wojnarowicz
No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As long as it makes you happy. For the rest of my life, I will do whatever it takes to ensure it. As my wife, you will not want for anything. What you desire, I will provide.
Renee Vincent
Get up. Faith is the greatest magic of all. It can lift the world out of the darkness and bring it into the light. Be the Star of the Morning, the light that fills the world with magic. Be the Lightbringer, the Breaker of Shadows. Believe in yourself, Aurora Firedrake; believe in the Dawnstar. For if you have faith, anything is possible.
Farah Oomerbhoy
Everyone hears only what he understands.
Goethe
It's kind of funny to me listening to people who claim to have these great records of winning a hundred and some odd straight felony cases without a loss and that kind of stuff that you hear of all the time. I'm here to tell you, if you let me pick out which hundred cases I get to try, I'll win a hundred of them in a row, too. Case selection is everything in creating records like that. My philosophy was, I tried them all. If I made a determination that the evidence was sufficient to justify the prosecution, then I would try the case, and certainly whenever you do that, you're going to lose a certain percentage of them.
Mark Baker
We do not kill good people, for the world is better with them in it.
Faleena Hopkins
For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,
Joseph Campbell
True friendship is like sound health the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
Charles Caleb Colton
And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
Voltaire
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
Hilary Mantel
I've decided to be happy because it's good for my health.
Voltaire
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Herman Melville
He said he wouldn’t stay, as he didn’t care much for the smell of the paint, and fell over the scraper as he went out. Must get the scraper removed, or else I shall get into a scrape. I don’t often make jokes.
George Grossmith
If philosophy gets you lost in the labyrinth of symbols that distance us from reality, then it is part of the problem; if it motivates positive action that can create a better world, philosophy is usually a gift.
Oli Anderson
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan W. Watts
All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope.
Rebecca McNutt
You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one.
Roger Zelazny
I thought to myself: if it’s true that every person has a star in the sky, mine must be distant, dim, and absurd. Perhaps I never had a star.
Sadegh Hedayat
The future is travelling furiously toward you at incredible speed and will beat you to your destination to surprise you by its resemblance to what you have already seen.
Andrew Durbin
And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Without purpose, we're zombies aimlessly roaming the earth.
Ahmed Mostafa
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
Jason knew his life would never be the same again. British intelligence now had an ace up their sleeve, and Jason had to overcome his fears and deal with the secret world he was now a part of. He would have to grow a tough shell around himself. Despite his many friends, his grandparents and love of his father, he was painfully aware he was very much alone in this world. When it came down to it, there was only one person he could really rely on in the world,and he was called Jason Steed.
Mark A. Cooper
His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was justa man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But hisdiscourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neitherdisgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but onthe contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged tomore orderly, contented, hopeful lives.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
If you were three times poor, I would still have paid attention to you and fell head over heels in love with you.
Olga Goa
When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both – that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the "because" can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.
Rebecca Goldstein
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley
If a religious book makes you harbor ill thoughts about those with differing faith, then, you're reading the wrong crap of late.
Fakeer Ishavardas
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
Daniel C. Dennett
Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!
H.C. Artmann
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
H.G.Wells
If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then child abuse is not evil, it just may not happen to be your thing.
Rebecca Manley Pippert
Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more--it's sad, but that's the truth.
Banana Yoshimoto
...we should be grateful for them because without our family—the ancestors we descend from, the cousins we see once a year, the loves our lives we see every day—life is pretty boring.
Ellen DeGeneres
There is a kind of virtue that lies not in extraordinary actions, not in saving poor orphans from burning buildings, but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings comply with decent fire codes.
Randy Cohen
Ask and it shall be given you,'" I began. "'Seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you; For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.' We have the same message in the Book of Saint John," I said, sounding for all the world like a preacher...."Well, but how could I just stop there? Those words were worse than nothing if I didn't tell what they meant to Grandpa. Looking at the long rough box, I spoke timid, in a mumbled voice. Not preachified at all. "Grandpa didn't think Jesus meant, by that, that we should ast God for things, or for special favors. He said we could trust that in the nature of things, without astin', we'll get lots of blessin's and happy surprises and maybe a miracle or two. When Jesus said ast and you'll get it, He meant things of the spirit, not the flesh. Right now for instance, I could ast, 'Lord please raise Grandpa from the dead,' but it wouldn't happen. But I can say, 'Please, God, comfort me,' and I'll get heart's ease. Grandpa said Jesus meant us to ast for hope, forgiveness, and all that. Ast, 'Hep us not be scared, hep us not be greedy, give us courage to try." I was really carried away. "Ast any such and God will give it to you. But don't ast Him not to let fire burn, or say spare me from death. At least, uh, that's what Grandpa said.
Olive Ann Burns
One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.
Lidia Yuknavitch
I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again.
Libba Bray
I don't think you have talent!! But... I guess Fuuka will do.I have no choice!
Kiyohiko Azuma
She never asked for too much. She just wanted to be ordinary.
Meryl Sawyer
I’m not playing at all. And f**k you, you’re trying to pull me into vagina talk. I won’t do it. I don’t have feelings. None at all. And I’m keeping it that way.
Lexi Blake
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton
We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Maybe I should drown myself before I freeze to death?
Mark A. Cooper
There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.
Samuel Johnson
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
Conan O'Brien
It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.
Baltasar Gracián
Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.
Jean Paul Richter
I should have shouted "No" and left him. "But at least" said Satan in the deeps of my mind, "know what the temptation is before you do anything hastily.
Lord Dunsany
Time spent in prayer is never wasted.
Francois de Fenelon
Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.
Amos Bronson Alcott