Kaj Beeson > Kaj's Quotes

“I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
― Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-Baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlett, still
Clasped empty in the other, and
One sees with a sharp tender shock
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long,
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see,
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes being
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came

Washing at their identity.
Now helpless in the hollow
Of an unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains.

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost-true:
What will survive of us is love.

- An Arundel Tomb”
― Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas