Auden > Auden's Quotes

“the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

“The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“...laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“...there is nothing radical about common sense.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”
― Samuel Beckett , Waiting for Godot

“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A man defines
himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so?”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I don't know what to do
two states of mind in me”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“not one girl I think
who looks on the light of the sun
will ever
have wisdom
like this”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“I rebel; therefore I exist.”
― Albert Camus

“And never have I felt so deeply
at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski