Philippe > Philippe's Quotes

“You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know." I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”
― J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns.”
― Tom Waits

“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“People are crazy and times are strange ... I used to care but things have changed ”
― BOB DYLAN

“The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.” Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it.”
― Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous !

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”
― Steve Martin

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“Respecter une femme, c'est pouvoir envisager l'amitié avec elle ; ce qui n'exclut pas le jeu de la séduction, et même, dans certains cas, le désir et l'amour.”
― Tahar Ben Jelloun

“Résister, c'est créer. Créer, c'est résister.”
― Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous !

“Pour le voir, il faut bien regarder, chercher. Je dis aux jeunes: cherchez un peu, vous allez trouver. La pire des attitudes est l'indifférence, dire «je n'y peux rien, je me débrouille». En vous comportant ainsi, vous perdez l'une des composantes essentielles qui fait l'humain. Une des composantes indispensables: la faculté d'indignation et l'engagement qui en est la conséquence.”
― Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous !

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“It's a strange grief… to die of nostalgia for something you will never live.”
― Alessandro Baricco, Silk

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”
― Moli

“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”
― Jacques Cousteau

“L'amitié, dit-il, ce n'est pas d'être avec ses amis quand ils ont raison, c'est être avec eux même quand ils ont tord.

”
― Andre Malraux

“To read without joy is stupid.”
― John Williams

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“…zag jij misschien dat ik naar jou,
dat ik je zag en dat ik zag hoe jij
naar mij te kijken zoals ik naar jou
en dat ik hoe dat heet zo steels,
zo en passant en ook zo zijdelings -
dat ik je net zo lang bekeek tot ik
naar je staarde en dat ik staren bleef.
Ik zag je toen en ik wist in te zien
dat in mijn leven zoveel is gezien
zonder dat ik het ooit eerder zag:
dat kijken zoveel liefs vermag.”
― Joost Zwagerman

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism