Jan Hrubý > Jan's Quotes

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“Charles Baudelaire: Get Drunk
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: 'It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!'
-- Charles Baudelaire, tr. Michael Hamburger”
― Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”
― Jean-Luc Godard

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Everything will usually get worse before it gets better, but when it does get better...remember all who put you down and all who helped you up. Forgive but never forget. Let Karma take care of all the rest.”
― Timothy Pina, Hearts for Haiti: Book of Poetry & Inspiration

“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“The best way out is always through.”
― Robert Frost

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only journey is the one within.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”
― Rainer Maria Rilke