Gonçalo > Gonçalo's Quotes

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us....but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?”
― J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The temple is holy because it is not for sale.”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
― Albert Camus

“Escolhem os Reis pela nobreza, os chefes pelo valor. O poder não é ilimitado nem arbitrário para os reis, e os chefes impõem-se pela admiração, mais por exemplo do que por autoridade, se são ousados e insignes, se actuam à frente na linha de batalha.”
― Tacitus, Germânia

“A friend to all is a friend to none.”
― Aristotle

“He who belies his talent, the born painter who sells stockings instead, the intelligent man who lives a stupid life, the man who sees the truth and keeps his mouth shut, the coward who gives up his manliness, all these people perceive in a deep way that they have done wrong to themselves and despise themselves for it. Out of this self-punishment may come only neurosis, but there may equally well come renewed courage, righteous indignation, increased self-respect, because of thereafter doing the right thing; in a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.”
― Seneca

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
― Seneca

“Why all the guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Tenho pensamentos que, se conseguisse realizá-los e torná-los vivos, acrescentariam uma nova luz às estrelas, uma nova beleza ao mundo e um maior amor ao coração dos homens.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.”
― the Smiths

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions...
Ideology—that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Forgive yourself for everything: you were only learning what it means to be human.”
― Marcus Antonius

“Tudo isto é quanto a vida vale: homens e mulheres, amores supostos e vaidades factícias, subterfúgios da digestão e do esquecimento, gente remexendo-se, como bichos quando se levanta uma pedra, sob o grande pedregulho abstrato do céu azul sem sentido.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Trazem-me a fé como um embrulho fechado numa salva alheia. Querem que o aceite, mas que o não abra. Trazem-me a ciência, como uma faca num prato, com que abrirei as folhas de um livro de páginas brancas. Trazem-me a dúvida como o pó dentro de uma caixa; mas para quem e trazem a caixa, se ela não tem senão pó?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody else's equal, 'At bottom we are all herd and mob.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling