Mstyslav > Mstyslav's Quotes

“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
― Samwise Gamgee

“Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”
― John Updike, A Month of Sundays

“An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”
― Carl Jung

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
― Winston Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor”
― Alexis Carrel

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

“you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;
how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
― Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“Pressure makes diamonds”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
― David Foster Wallace

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
― David Foster Wallace