Samuel Kim > Samuel's Quotes

“There are no men like me. There's only me”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Lord give me chastity and self control - but not yet.”
― St. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Annotated Christianity theology in Middle Age and Reformation): 13 Christianity religious books from the Middle Age of the sinful and immoral life

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“All that must disappear
Is but a parable;
What lay beyond us, here
All is made visible;
Here deeds have understood
Words they were darkened by;
The Eternal Feminine
Draws us on high.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two

“Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”
― James Joyce, The Dead

“the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.

[Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]”
― Johannes Kepler

“I dwell in possibility…”
― Emily Dickinson

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradise

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
― T.S. Eliot

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason”
― G K Chesterton

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Witch and Other Stories

“I certainly believe this: that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under it is necessary to beat her and force her down. It is clear that she more often allows herself to be won over by impetuous men than by those who proceed coldly. And so, like a woman, Fortune is always the friend of young men, for they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near
lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are
flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life
and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I
saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get
round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he
asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the
sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey
and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the
sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they
called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with
the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish
girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in
the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who
else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all
clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep
and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and
the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of
years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like
kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with
the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her
lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the
castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman
going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and
the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and
the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets
and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the
jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was
a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the
Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”
― mao tse-tung

“At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Guilt is the uncomfortable certainty that we are not what we could have been.”
― Michael Sugrue

“The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity.”
― William Blake, The Letters of William Blake, with Related Documents

“This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.”
― Wolfgang Pauli

“The student who majors in philosophy primarily for spiritual comfort is misguided and probably not a very good student anyway, since intellectual curiosity is not what moves him.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine