Audimaus > Audimaus's Quotes

“—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2

“The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“Think of that! He removes his hat without misgiving, he unbuttons his coat and sits down, proffered all pure and open to the long joys of being himself, like a basin to a vomit.”
― Samuel Beckett, Watt

“In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“I can forget injuries, but never benefits.”
― Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

“Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them.  They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them.”
― Oscar Wilde, Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
― Mark Twain

“For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimolous to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae