Ben Carter > Ben's Quotes

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”
― Pericles

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when". ”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.”
― Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura

“For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.”
― Lucretius, The Nature of Things

“Trees don't live in the sky, and clouds don't swim
In the salt seas, and fish don't leap in wheatfields,
Blood isn't found in wood, nor sap in rocks.
By fixed arrangement, all that live and grows
Submits to limit and restrictions.”
― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

“Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche