Maximus > Maximus's Quotes

“Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality.”
― Francesco Petrarca, The Poetry of Petrarch

“For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.”
― Dante

“Humanity looked in awe upon the beauty and the everlasting duration of creation. The exquisite sky flooded with sunlight. The majesty of the dark night lit by celestial torches as the holy planetary powers trace their paths in the heavens in fixed and steady metre - ordering the growth of things with their secret infusions.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.”
― Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History

“The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.”
― Hermes Trismegistus

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.
It is when we are wounded by our own hands that love should come to cure us.
Else what use is love at all?”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“The individual who rebels against the arrangements of society is ostracized, branded, stoned. So be it. I am willing to take the risk; my principles are very pagan. I will live my own life as it pleases me. I am willing to do without your hypocritical respect; I prefer to be happy.
The inventors of the Christian marriage have done well, simultaneously to invent immortality. I, however, have no wish to live eternally. When with my last breath everything as far as Wanda von Dunajew is concerned comes to an end here below, what does it profit me whether my pure spirit joins the choirs of angels, or whether my dust goes into the formation of new beings?
Shall I belong to one man whom I don't love, merely because I have once loved him? No, I do not renounce; I love everyone who pleases me, and give happiness to everyone who loves me.
Is that ugly? No, it is more beautiful by far.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“The presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon highly organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom...have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“80. What is God? The immutable or unalterable good.
81. What is man? An unchangeable evil.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum: The Divine Pymander

“Dangerous forces lie within me. You awaken them, and not to your advantage. You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading. - 27-66 AD”
― Petronius

“It is only man's egoism which wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.”
― Plutarch

“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.

That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind...”
― Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

“Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.”
― Plutarch, The Fall of the Roman Republic

“People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the soul of a king.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Of all the disorders in the soul, envy is the only one no one confesses to.”
― Plutarch

“By this time I was no
longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the
limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,
and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”
― Plutarch