Nunaja > Nunaja's Quotes

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“He knew he was reeling down in Mary's estimation and he wanted her to love him and to admire him. At the same time there was a fine steel wire of truthfulness in him that cut off the heads of fast-traveling lies.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.”
― John Steinbeck

“There is no dignity in death in battle. Mostly that is a splashing about of human meat and fluid, and the result is filthy, but there is a great and almost sweet dignity in the sorrow, the helpless, the hopeless sorrow, that comes down over a family with the telegram. Nothing to say, nothing to do, and only one hope—I hope he didn’t suffer—and what a forlorn and last-choice hope that is.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
― Aristotle

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“Det er ikke den mest troende som får legitimitet, men den som fører en kamp som er identisk med folkets kamp.”
― Amin Maalouf

“Til gjengjeld er det store sjanser for at ethvert amerikansk valg heretter vil bli et verdensomspennende psykordrama.”
― Amin Maalouf

“Tenk så mange fornuftige reformer som har mislykkes fordi de bar stemplet til en forhatt myndighet! Og omvendt, så mange uforstandige handlinger som er blitt bejublet fordi de ble approbert av en med legitimitet fra kampmarken! Dette er en sannhet som er gyldig overalt, når et forslag blir lagt ut til avstemning, uttaler velgerne seg i mindre grad om selve saken enn om hvilken tiltro de har til han eller de som har lagt den fram.”
― Amin Maalouf

“Today, our most important and most productive task is the national education [unification and modernization] affairs. We have to be successful in national education affairs and we shall be. The liberation of a nation is only achieved through this way.”
― Atatürk

“The Executive Committee of the People's Will had scored it's biggest success on 1 March 1881 by assassinating Alexander II, but also its biggest failure. (...) The aim of terror was to rouse the people from their torpor and trigger a mass uprising based on previous models (Razin/Pugatchev), but this time under new conditions and in order to completely destroy the autocracy and its institutions. It never worked out and, in a grumpy mood, Lenin once characterised terrorists as liberals with bombs, suggesting that both held the opinion that propaganda alone, of deed or word, would be sufficient for the task that lay ahead. For the most part terrorist acts scared people and legitimised government repression.”
― Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution

“I thank Allah that, I the humble tree before you, have not been drawn witch such intent. And not only because I fear that if I'd been thus depicted all the dogs in Istanbul would assume I was a real tree and piss on me: I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“There's likely to be a battle, a war, The blind are always at war, always have been at war.”
― Saramago

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“...all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.”
― Saramago

“don't ask me what good and what evil are, we knew
what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an ex-
ception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different
ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that
which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”
― Jose Saramago, Blindness

“Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
― Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

“Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage