Nathan > Nathan's Quotes

“Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
― Pancho Villa

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Libro del desasosiego

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Essay on Adam"

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these

is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.”
― Robert Bringhurst

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
― Rousseau

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The truth brings no man a fortune.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
― Henri Bergson

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
― Henri Bergson

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

“A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.”
― Henri Bergson

“You are the way and the wayfarers.
And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.
Aye, and he falls for those ahead of him, who, though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“She does not show herself, and therefore is apparent. She does not affirm herself, and therefore is acknowledged. She does not boast and therefore has merit. She does not strive and therefore is successful. It is exactly because she does not contend, that nobody can contend with her.”
― Lao Tzu

“How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“A wasting memory is not only a destroyer; it can deny one's very existence. A day unremembered is like a soul unborn, worse than if it had never been. What indeed was that summer if it is not recalled? That journey? That act of love? To whom did it happen if it has left you with nothing? Certainly not to you. So any bits of warm life preserved by the pen are trophies snatched from the dark, are branches of leaves fished out of the flood, are tiny arrests of mortality.”
― Laurie Lee

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The journey itself is my home.”
― Matsuo Basho

“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”
― Horace