Steven > Steven's Quotes

“Through incompleteness one becomes susceptible to other influences, and to assimilate those strange influences is the aim.”
― Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose

“Adam and Eve. What through a revolution was effected, must through a revolution be overthrown.”
― Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose

“In the end, the comprehensibility of phenomena rests upon faith and will. If I make a mystery of a manifestation, then it is a mystery for me. It is therefore the same with boundaries.”
― Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose

“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The moral system must become a natural system. All sickness is the equivalent of sin; it is through an excess that it is transcended. Our sicknesses are all phenomena of a heightened sensation that in great force will overflow.
As man would become God, he sins-- The sickness of plants is animalization; the sickness of animals is rationalization; the sickness of stones is vegetation. Shouldn't each plant correspond to a stone and to an animal?
Reality of sympathy. Parallelisms of the natural realm. --Plants are dead stones; animals are dead plants, and so forth. Theory of metempsychosis.”
― Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose

“Many things are too delicate to be thought, much less spoken of in words.”
― Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose

“When I flew over the Atlas Mountains in a plane, I realized that their formation-through erosion, geological dramas, the action of winds-was completely independent of our moral anxieties; man is in a kind of cyclone; he builds solid houses to protect and shelter his heart. Outside, nature is nothing but indifference, even terror.”
― Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“You spit on a petty thief, but you can't withhold a sort of respect from a great criminal. His courage bowls you over.
His brutality makes you shudder. What you value in everything is consistency of character.”
― Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau

“Could if be that there is something dubious about hope and that when hope has disappeared from a man's life his life assumes a more severe and positive character?
Could it be that life seems so much the more real when all illusions have vanished, just as the contours of a mountain ridge appear more clearly on the horizon when the clouds are gone?”
― Benjamin Constant, Adolphe

“Thus it is that bodies shut in tombs often preserve their original shape until the outside air reaches them and reduces them to dust.”
― Benjamin Constant, Adolphe

“Under the Caesars there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“You have suffered greatly, poor mother. Oh! do not lament, you have now the portion of the elect. It is in this way that mortals become angels. It is not their fault; they do not know how to set about it otherwise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Nothing is duller than a progression of common chords. One wants some contrast, which breaks up the clear white light and makes it iridescent.”
― Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream

“To rot under marble or to rot under earth is still to rot.”
― Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau

“Supreme art is the region of Equals. There is no primacy among masterpieces.”
― Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare

“It is easier to know mankind in general than any particular man.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“All this was so violent and strange that he suddenly felt that kind of indescribable movement that no man experiences more than two or three times in his life, a sort of convulsion of the conscience that stirs up all that is dubious in the heart, which is composed of irony, of joy, and of despair, and which might be called a burst of interior laughter.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“You go forth with joy to gather flowers for your queen in winter, and grieve when you can find none, and cannot understand why they do not grow.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Sometimes a tall column stood alone in the wilderness, as a great thought stands alone in the soul which time and sorrow have crushed.”
― François-René de Chateaubriand, René

“Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.”
― T.E. Hulme

“Man abides in truth. As one prizes truth, so one cherishes oneself. Whoever betrays truth, betrays himself. We speak not of lies here, but rather of acts against convictions.”
― Novalis, Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose

“The individual is not the sum of his common impressions but of his unusual ones.”
― Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter

“Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are”
― W.S. Merwin

“Here is a fact which may seem discouraging at first blush, but one which on reflection will encourage and inspire confidence; immense industrial undertakings do not need great men.”
― Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning

“Some follies can be caught, like contagious diseases.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Like water, which heated to a hundred degrees will bear no increase of temperature, human thought attains in certain men its maximum intensity.”
― Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare

“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
― Ken Kesey

“I have often reflected, dear Wilhelm, on the eagerness of men to wander about and make new discoveries, and on that secret urge which afterwards makes them return to their narrow circle, conform to the customary path, and pay no attention to the right or the left.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.”
― Zadie Smith