Ramdane Ramdane > Ramdane's Quotes

“The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
― Franz Kafka

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

“It might feel, at least to some of us, that our opinions about issues such as abortion and the death penalty are the products of careful deliberation and that our specific moral acts, such as deciding to give to charity or visit a friend in the hospital—or for that matter, deciding to shoplift or shout a racist insult out
of a car window—are grounded in conscious decision-making. But this is said to be mistaken. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. "We celebrate rationality," agrees de Waal, "but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

“Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Moonlight turns even the most civilised man into a primitive.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal

“There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“he told Byam he had rather die than live upon the same earth with such dogs.”
― Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

“There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
― Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

“It's easy to do anything in victory. It's in defeat that a man reveals himself.”
― Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“My will is mine...I shall not make it soft for you.”
― Aeschylus, Agamemnon

“There is only one world-view that is worthy of us, and which has already been discussed as the Choice of Achilles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance. The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time cannot be stopped; there is no possibility for prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end as destiny demands. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost post, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. . . . The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man. P 30”
― Ernst Jünger, On Pain

“Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.”
― NICOLAS BERDYAEV

“The lesson of history is that no one learns.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I by not doing, not by doing, lost”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.
I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Discusión

“Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory.”
― Algernon Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland