Eugenio Riveros > Eugenio's Quotes

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."

("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“When reason fails, the devil helps!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Andábamos sin buscarnos, pero sabiendo que andábamos para encontrarnos”
― Julio Cortazar, Rayuela

“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy... So long as we persist in this inborn error... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”
― Gilles Deleuze