Mike > Mike's Quotes

“To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
― Francis Bacon

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.”
― Werner Herzog

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
― Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams

“The medium is the message.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Most of our expressions are metaphorical - the philosophy of our forefathers lies hidden in them.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
― Henri Bergson

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms.”
― Marion Woodman

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”
― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

“What am I in this instant? I’m a typewriter making the dry echo in the dark, humid dawn. I haven’t been human for a long time. They wanted me to be an object. I am an object. An object dirty with blood. An object that creates other objects and the machine creates us all. It makes demands. Mechanisms make endless demands on my life. But I don’t totally obey: if I have to be an object, let me be an object that screams. There’s something inside of me that hurts. Oh, how it hurts and how it screams for help. But tears aren’t there in the machine that is me. I’m an object without a destiny. I’m an object in whose hands? such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of what’s inside the object behind the behind of the thought-feeling. I’m an urgent object.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon