Joel > Joel's Quotes

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“A story untold could be the one that kills you.”
― Pat Conroy

“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
― Isak Dinesen

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
― William Blake

“One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“A city is simply a passel of people packed in a pot like pickles.”
― David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War – A Tense Drama of Political Passions, Military Restraint, and America's First Shot

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength. ”
― Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills

“Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.”
― John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization

“The path to paradise begins in hell.”
― Dante Alighieri

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.”
― Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction”
― Isabel Allende

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Hannah Arendt

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. ”
― Hannah Arendt

“War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.”
― Hannah Arendt