W > W's Quotes

“The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.”
― Lao Tzu, Te-Tao Ching

“Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.”
― Keith Richards, Keith Richards: In His Own Words

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
― E.M. Forster

“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.
–The Grand Inquisitor”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“I told you before, that there are different ways to fail. Imperfection is inevitable. That’s life. But it doesn’t sound to me like you failed at all, Eve. It sounds like your dream broke, and you’ve been picking up shattered pieces, and blaming yourself when your hands bleed.”
― Talia Hibbert, Act Your Age, Eve Brown

“Sometimes, being convenient instead of real was exhausting. So maybe from now on, she’d stop.”
― Talia Hibbert, Act Your Age, Eve Brown

“I don’t know which half of my brain is the smart half and which half is all emotional and shit."
"Maybe the smart half is all emotional and shit."
"Yes, I’d been afraid of that.”
― Talia Hibbert, Act Your Age, Eve Brown

“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Kafka, Franz

“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“You are free and that is why you are lost.”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“You can choose to be free , but it's last decision you'll ever make”
― -Kafka

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“[Dean] “My dear fellow, who will let you?”

[Roark] “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Life is a constant process of dying.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.
The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far―and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!
It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all; the ascetic ideal was in every sense the "faute de mieux" par excellence so far.
In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism.
This interpretation - there is no doubt of it - brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.
But all this notwithstanding - man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer 1ike a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense - the "sense-less" - he could now willsomething; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself.
All this means - let us dare to grasp it - a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will.
Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals