- > -'s Quotes

“Dinlemesini biliyorsun, ki bu mühim bir meziyettir. Hiçbir işe yaramasa bile insanın boşluğunu örter, karşısındakiyle aynı seviyeye çıkarır”
― Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü

“He is so polite! —Yes, he always carries a biscuit for Cerberus, and is so timid that he takes everybody for Cerberus, even you and me,—that is his politeness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“Is it not humiliating thus to become the toy of others' pride? Is it not yet more so to fall into indebtedness to them? Nothing is more burdensome than a kindness one has received. No middle way, no compromise: you have got to repay it or ready yourself for abuse. Upon proud spirits a good deed sits very heavily: it weighs upon them with such violence that the one feeling they exhale is hatred for their benefactors.”
― Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir

“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”
― Julius Caesar

“İlim maalesef amelî müstelzim değildir. Zira ilmin kaynağı zekâ, amelinki ise, iradedir.”
― Ali Fuad Başgil, Gençlerle Başbaşa

“Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others”
― Paul Lafargue

“All individual and social woes are born of
passion for work.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“The laborers themselves in co-operating toward the accumulation of productive capital contribute to the event which sooner or later must deprive them of a part of their wages”
― Victor Cherbuliez

“Then the king said, “Not I, not I. You yourselves are king. When you deemed me weak and a misruler, you yourselves were weak and misruling. And now the land fares well because it is in your will. I am but a thought in the mind of you all, and I exist not save in your actions. There is no such person as governor. Only the governed exist to govern themselves.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“You looked at them and wondered why the were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The mast had said, "You are ugly people." They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. "Yes," they had said. "You are right.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.”
― Stefan Zweig, Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman & The Royal Game

“Hâl yoktur, mazi ve onun emrinde bir istikbal vardır. Biz farkında olmadan istikbalimizi inşa ederiz.”
― Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü

“insan bir bilgi birikimine ulaştığında bir şeyler söylemek zorunda kalır ve abuk sabuk laflar eder zorunlu olarak.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“bir uçurumun kıyısındayızdır. öylece bakarız, midemiz bulanır, başımız döner. önce oradan derhal uzaklaşmamız gerektiğini düşünürüz, fakat akıl almaz bir biçimde olduğumuz yere çakılırız. mide bulantımız baş dönmemiz, korkumuz tuhaf bir pusun içinde birleşir. binbir gece masalları'nda şişeden süzülen şeyin biçimlenmesi gibi bu pus usulca biçimlenir. uçurumun kıyısındayken oluşan bu pustan masallardaki cin ve iblislerden daha beterleri doğar, uçurumdan düşerken ne denli korkacağımızı hayal ederiz. ve bu düşüş, bu ani yok oluş, hayal edebileceğimiz en berbat ve feci son olacağından, işte tam da bu sebeple ölümü arzularız. bir uçurumun kıyısında tir tir titreyerek durup atlamayı düşünen insanın hissiyatı şeytani bir sabırsızlığa evrilir. bir anlığına düşünmeye kalkışsak, işimiz bitti demektir, çünkü düşünmek vazgeçiştir, tam da bu sebeple düşünmeyiz uçurumun kıyısından bizi çekip kurtaracak biri yoksa ya da geri adım atmayı beceremezsek kendimizi uçurumun dibinde buluruz.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see.”
― J. D Salinger