Skyler > Skyler's Quotes

“I want to make Romeo jealous! I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimolous to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don’t want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It’s something relative to the past and the future.
It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don’t want to include time in my scheme.
I don’t want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don’t want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn’t even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can’t think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

“I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...
If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“Whenever someone chooses her attire with care and purpose and wears it with confidence and conviction, it is a small victory for human flourishing.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Zuckerberg in his uniform of gray T-shirts embodied the ideal ethos of Silicon Valley: an unselfconscious nerd too busy obsessively designing tomorrow’s technology to worry about appearances. This has a naïve charm. But if the CEO of the company thinks he isn’t doing his job if he spends any energy on the frivolous matter of attire, then what are we to think of the employee who arrives at work wearing a sharp tailored suit or a pair of high-heeled Louboutins? Here Zuckerberg’s shift to the second person is revealing: he begins discussing his own ambitions but then insists that “making… decisions about what you wear… consumes your energy.” Purported indifference to appearance becomes a reason to judge based on appearance; a new dress code displaces an older one.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“It’s in this way that the mystique of preppy style has retained its staying power: anyone with the temerity to question it has, by his very skepticism, revealed himself as untutored, too dim to appreciate the heightened sensibilities of the blue-blooded. Preppies may feign offense at this description but they will in fact take none because their aspiration is neither stylishness nor beauty but exclusivity, which they brilliantly achieve.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“most gendered clothing doesn’t refer to human biology; instead it reflects a social convention. “Women’s clothing” isn’t clothing that is especially suited to female bodies—it is simply any clothing that women typically wear. This means that every transgression of gender norms is also a potential revision of those norms:”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“For a woman, respecting tradition isn’t an option when the tradition in question involves the exclusion of women.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Modesty is, by design, always a moving target. Any group of women—no matter how they are dressed—can and will be divided into the virtuous and the sinful, the good girls and the bad girls (and because women carry the guilt of Eve’s original sin, moralists will always find some bad ones).”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Ironically, dress codes that require modesty can eroticize the boundary between permissible and illicit, encouraging lust rather than preventing it. Concealment contains the timeless allure of forbidden fruit.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”
― Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“Beauty will save the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: "Beauty will save the world". What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes - but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition - and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force - they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world", was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Together we can face any challenges as deep as the ocean and as high as the sky”
― Sonia Gandhi