Joseph > Joseph's Quotes

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne , The Complete Essays

“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
― Albert Camus, Summer in Algiers

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“He might be ragged and cold or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.”
― Marcel Proust

“Self love is like that instrument by which we propagate the species: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it must be hidden.”
― Voltaire

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
― Montaigne, Les Essais

“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”
― Virginia Woolf

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
― Albert Camus

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
― Albert Camus

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time