Joshua > Joshua's Quotes

“The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time.”
― Frank Herbert

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but, onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso

“The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“A great man is always willing to be little.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

“The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every, calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes...”
― Lord Byron

“Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your own clothes.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
― James Madison

“It is a common fault of men not to reckon on storms in fair weather.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“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

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Conquer yourself rather than the world.”
― René Descartes

“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is ‘Thou shalt not question!”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Do not be an unwise churl and rail at society nor so worldly wise as to condemn solitude. But use them as conditions. Be their master, not their slave. Make circumstance,—all circumstance, conform to the law of your mind. Be always a king, and not they, and nothing shall hurt you.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”
― Peter Singer