Mila > Mila's Quotes

“No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”
― Bob Dylan

“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)”
― Voltaire

“Language transcends us and yet we speak.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Ambition is the last refuge of the failure”
― Oscar Wilde

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.”
― Charles Stross, Rule 34

“Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.”
― Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best I could and I found human beings inside. The writing was only a residue. A man didn't have to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong he'd feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
― Albert Einstein

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan

“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Education is no substitute for intelligence.”
― Frank Herbert

“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”
― Martha Graham

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World