Nu > Nu's Quotes

“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
― Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Do you need an excuse to have a war? I mean, who for? Can't you just say "You got lots of cash and land, but I've got a big sword, so divvy up right now, chop chop.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Actually, this is a poem my father once showed me, a long time ago. It has been bastardized many times, in many ways, but this is the original:

The Cold Within

Six men trapped by happenstance,
in bleak and bitter cold

Each possessed a stick of wood,
or so the story's told.

Their dying fire in need of logs,
the first man held his back

For of the faces round the fire,
he noticed one was black.

One man looking cross the way,
saw one not of his church

And could not bring himself to give
the fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes,
he gave his coat a hitch

Why should his log be put to use
to warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
of the wealth he had in store

And how to keep what he had earned
from the lazy, shiftless poor.

The black man's face bespoke revenge
as the fire passed from his sight,

For all he saw in his stick of wood
was a chance to spite the white.

And the last man of this forlorn group
did naught except for gain,

Giving only to those who gave,
was how he played the game

The logs held tight, in death's still
hands,
was proof of human sin

They didn't die from the cold without,
they died from the cold within.”
― James Patrick Kinney

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“But we're a university! We have to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?"

"Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“I don't think I've drunk enough beer to understand that.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?” “Why?” “It saves time.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
― W.H. Auden, New Year Letter

“The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas

“There is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves.”
― Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air

“I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country’s edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“To realize that everything in the universe is connected is to both accept our insignificance and understand our importance in it.”
― Jeffrey Fry

“It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
― Edith Wharton

“The sea tells you everything will be fine. The mountains tell you it doesn’t matter anyway.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn how to enjoy it.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

“Purpose is finding significance in something so astronomically insignificant.”
― Viktor Tatarczuk

“Please God, whatever I was I am no longer….All is forgotten, if not forgiven—it could have come to that. But I don’t trust the thought. I don’t know if it’s because it would be too easy or too terrible to imagine no one cares anymore.”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“Every man walks his own path, and every path has its fair share of locked doors. You never know who holds the key to a door you’ll need to open one day, so you best treat people as if they are all keyholders.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar