Eilidh > Eilidh's Quotes

“So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory...but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night.

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

All the rest is darkness.”
― Stephen King, It

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“You cannot repress anger or love, or avoid feeling them, and you should not try.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
― Nicolas Chamfort

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“...it is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“He had no prejudice against Orientals; indeed, he was deeply fond of them. Provided they were given no freedom he thought them the most charming people alive.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“The characteristic error of the middle-class intellectual of modern times is his tendency to abstractness and absoluteness, his reluctance to connect idea with fact, especially with personal fact. I cannot recall that Orwell ever related his criticism of the intelligentsia to the implications of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but he might have done so, for the prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. It is an act that has something about it of ritual thaumaturgy—at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which gives them power on condition that they withdraw from the ordinary life of the tribe. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles and imponderables, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the material quotidian world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.”
― Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays

“Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions — notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful — are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“...for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Words are such feeble things.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“HIERONIMO. O eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life! no life, but lively form of death
O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confus'd and fill'd with murder and misdeeds!
O sacred heav'ns! if this unhallowed deed,
If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,
If this incomparable murder thus
Of mine, but now no more my son,
Shall unreveal'd and unreveng'd pass,
How should we term your dealings to be just,
If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?”
― Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
― George Orwell, 1984