Umar Farooq > Umar's Quotes

“We men are wretched things, and the gods, who have no cares themselves, have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives...Zeus the Thunderer has two jars standing on the floor of his palace, in which he keeps his gifts, the evils in one and the blessings in the other.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“For a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say
that we devise their misery. But they
themselves- in their depravity- design
grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“My name is Nobody.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Each man delights in the work that suits him best.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Come, Friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.
And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life--
A deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
Death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
When a man will take my life in battle too--
flinging a spear perhaps
Or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“It is not a sin, he tells himself, there is no sin left now, there is only the blood and the water and the ice; there is only life and death and the gray-green spaces in between. He will not die, he tells himself, not now, not ever. When he is thirsty, he will drink his own blood; when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh. He will grow enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.”
― Ian McGuire, The North Water

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.”
― Ian McGuire, The North Water

“The most important questions are the ones we can't hope to answer with words. Words are like toys : they amuse and educate us for a time, but when we come to manhood, we should give them up.'
Sunmer shakes his head.
' The words are all we have,' he says.' If we give them up, we are no better than the beasts.'
Otto smiles at Sunmer's wrong headedness.
' Then you must find out the explanations on your own, if that is what you truly think.”
― Ian McGuire , The North Water

“I’ve brought the sufferings on myself, I’d say. I’ve made mistakes aplenty.” “Show me a man who hasn’t, and I will show you a saint or a great liar. And I haven’t met too many saints in my long lifetime.” The”
― Ian McGuire, The North Water

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial

“It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage. Sumner”
― Ian McGuire, The North Water

“It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.”
― Murasaki Shikibu , Diaries of court ladies of old Japan