Sasha > Sasha's Quotes

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.”
― Franz Kafka

“The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.”
― Franz Kafka

“Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
― George Carlin

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.”
― Théophile Gautier

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
― Isaiah Berlin

“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”
― Walter Benjamin

“می‌پرم روی دوچرخه
رکاب می‌زنم

جز باد
کسی تحمل این اشک‌ها را ندارد”
― سارا محمدی اردهالی / Sara Mohamadi Ardehali, روباه سفیدی که عاشق موسیقی بود

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“به زودی
آنچه را که گفنتی داریم
تمام خواهد شد
و ما خواهیم ماند
و تنهایی ما”
― بیژن جلالی

“براي زنده ماندن به 2 خورشيد نياز داريد :
يكي در قلب و يكي در آسمان”
― نادر ابراهيمي

“منظره‌ی ویرانی آدم‌ها غم‌انگیزترین منظره‌ی دنیاست .”
― رضا قاسمی / Reza Ghasemi

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“دختران شهر
به روستا فکر می کنند
دختران روستا
در آرزوی شهر می میرند
مردان کوچک
به آسایش مردان بزرگ فکر می کنند
مردان بزرگ
در آرزوی آرامش مردان کوچک
می میرند
کدام پل
در کجای جهان
شکسته است
که هیچکس به خانه اش نمی رسد”
― گروس عبدالملکیان