Nitesh > Nitesh's Quotes

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind.”
― John Lubbock

“Books console us, calm us, prepare us, enrich us and redeem us.”
― Jose Marti

“The Seven Social Sins are:

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.


From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.”
― Frederick Lewis Donaldson

“The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.”
― Anatole France

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
― Carl Sagan

“Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
― George Carlin

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”
― Graham Greene

“Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.”
― Dr. Seuss

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

“Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.”
― Paul Cezanne

“The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all”
― Susan Sontag

“Peace might sell, but who's buying?”
― Joan Baez

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“and because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day's
pale knowledge,

you'll come to yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,

and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.”
― John Burnside, Selected Poems

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“There's a bit of magic in everything
And then some loss to even things out.”
― Lou Reed, I'll Be Your Mirror: The Collected Lyrics

“I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick