Spiritus > Spiritus's Quotes

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions Of A Girl Gang

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”
― John Steinbeck

“One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories

“God, who am I?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“لا يتم إنتاج الحقيقة بطريقة واحدة، بل إن هناك طرق كثيرة تختلف باختلاف المجالات المعرفية وأنظمة الفكر والأدوات المنهجية والذوات العارفة، ولا يمكن لنا إلا أن نخالف ابن رشد ها هنا في زعمه أن الطريق البرهاني هو الطريق الأصح، والمقصود به هو طريق الفلاسفة، فالحقيقة التي تنتج في الشعر وفي النبوءة ليست أقل قيمة أو مرتبة من الحقيقة الفلسفية، والأداة الفلسفية ليست أكثر كشفا وإضاءة من الأداة الشعرية، أو من الآلة التي يمثلها الخيال، فالخيال هو ملكة معرفية تمكننا من استكشاف وجودنا على قدم المساواة مع العقل، فضلا عن كونه مرتبة وجودية، تماما كالعقل ذاته، هذا مع أن الفصل بين العقل والخيال لا يخلو من تحكم وتعسف.”
― علي حرب

“I know exactly the potential of the people around here. They have the potential to lie. They have the potential to deceive. They have the potential to inveigle. They’ll change nothing. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie awake thinking, my God! We have so much. We have these huge forests. We have boundless open fields. We can see the deepest, furthest horizons. Look around you. Look. We should be giants. We really, really aren’t.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard