Nora > Nora's Quotes

“Never laugh at live dragons.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”
― Ken Kesey, Kesey's Garage Sale

“A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.”
― China Miéville, King Rat

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”
― Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains

“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Riding Shotgun

“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays

“Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.”
― Francis Bacon

“Wonder is the seed of knowledge”
― Francis Bacon

“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted ...but to weigh and consider.”
― Francis Bacon

“It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.”
― Francis Bacon

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”
― Francis Bacon

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”
― Francis Bacon

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”
― Francis Bacon

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake...”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
― Francis Bacon

“In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.”
― Francis Bacon

“Ipsa scientia potestas est.

Knowledge itself is power.”
― Francis Bacon, Meditations Sacrae and Human Philosophy

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement