Anka > Anka's Quotes

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

“Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“I saw the truth, I saw and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of people.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Oh, maybe it started innocently,
with a joke, with coquetry, with amorous play, maybe, indeed, with an atom, but
this atom of lie penetrated their hearts, and they liked it. Then sensuality was
quickly born, sensuality generated jealousy, and jealousy - cruelty. . . Oh, I don’t
know, I don’t remember, but soon, very soon, the first blood was shed; they were
astonished and horrified, and began to part, to separate. Alliances appeared, but
against each other now. Rebukes, reproaches began. They knew shame, and shame
was made into a virtue. The notion of honor was born, and each alliance raised its
own banner. They began tormenting animals, and the animals withdrew from them
into the forests and became their enemies. There began the struggle for separation,
for isolation, for the personal, for mine and yours. They started speaking different
languages. They knew sorrow and came to love sorrow, they thirsted for suffering
and said that truth is attained only through suffering. Then science appeared
among them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas.
As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes to observe it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.”
― Stanisław Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration

“A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.”
― Stanisław Lem

“I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.”
― Stanisław Lem

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
― Bertrand Russell

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

“When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives: a Series in Social Thought & Cultural Ctiticism)

“Yet there is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share, whether or not they go only part way to the end of the question it poses. The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because, as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. 'He was immensely pro-Soviet,' she said,' and then -- you will laugh at me -- but you must not laugh at my father -- and then -- one night -- in Moscow -- he heard screams. That's all. Simply one night he heard screams.'

A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind's. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.”
― Whittaker Chambers, Witness

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
― Anais Nin

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anais Nin

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.”
― Alfred Whitehead

“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead