Maider > Maider's Quotes

“With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“Through the Unknown, we'll find the New”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“You're all sorts of things you don't even know yet.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“He made his usual mistake of ascribing too much intelligence to the people.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse - we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I can't bear to part with you, and yet I am miserable with anxiety as long as you stop here.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“The Chosen ones never know they are chosen. They think everyone gets a gold carpet rolled out for them.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“Let beauty perish if it cannot ally itself with mind.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women

“And I too change perpetually—now this, now that—now disappointed and peevish because all is not exactly as I had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that the reality is far more beautiful than I had imagined it.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
― Horace Walpole

“One must not permit oneself excesses, except with persons whom one wishes soon to leave.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence every one will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?”
― Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“What is it that constitutes virtue, Mrs. Graham? Is it the circumstance of being able and willing to resist temptation; or that of having no temptations to resist? - Is he a strong man that overcomes great obstacles and performs surprising achievements, though by dint of great muscular exertion, and at the risk of some subsequent fatigue, or he that sits in his chair all day, with nothing to do more laborious than stirring the fire, and carrying his food to his mouth? If you would have your son to walk honourably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.'

'I will lead him by the hand, Mr. Markham, till he has strength to go alone; and I will clear as many stones from his path as I can, and teach him to avoid the rest - or walk firmly over them, as you say; - for when I have done my utmost, in the way of clearance, there will still be plenty left to exercise all the agility, steadiness, and circumspection he will ever have. - It is all very well to talk about noble resistance, and trials of virtue; but for fifty - or five hundred men that have yielded to temptation, show me one that has had virtue to resist. And why should I take it for granted that my son will be one in a thousand? - and not rather prepare for the worst, and suppose he will be like his - like the rest of mankind, unless I take care to prevent it?”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
― Edith Wharton

“Indeed, if to be in love is not to be able to live without possessing that person one desires, to sacrifice to her one's time, one's pleasures, one's life, then I am really in love.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“No, my dear. We happen to be going to the root of things, that's all. Perhaps it's as well to do so now and then.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women

“No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South