Lyre > Lyre's Quotes

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“Values are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures”
― Sam Harris

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“It is a risk to love.
What if it doesn't work out?
Ah, but what if it does.”
― Peter McWilliams

“Do something instead of killing time. Because time is killing you.”
― Paulo Coelho, Aleph

“I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.”
― Harun Yahya

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“My father (Theodore Roosevelt) always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral,
the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”
― Alice Roosevelt Longworth

“How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong!”
― Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

“Blooming under a cold moon, we are like fireworks...
Rising, shining, and finally scattering and fading.
So until that moment comes when we vanish like fireworks...
Lets us sparkle brightly,
Always...”
― Tite Kubo

“Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?”
― Annie Dillard

“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
― George Orwell

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Things never happen the same way twice.”
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

“I can live neither with you, nor without you.”
― Ovid, Amores

“It's not because we can't take vengeance that we should feel sorry. The real reason to feel sorry... is when one is hung up on revenge and can't live their own life.”
― ishida sui

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“We have nothing if not belief.”
― CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“Just by living, people hurt others without even realizing it. So long as humanity exists, hate will also exist. There is no peace in this cursed world. War is just a crime paid for by the pain of the defeated...”
― Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto 12: Le Duel

“Remember this well. There are two kind of fights. As long as we place ourselves in battle, we must always know the difference: fights to defend life… and fights to defend pride…”
― Tite Kubo, Bleach, Vol. 1

“Be grateful for the things and people you have in your life. Things you take for granted someone else is praying for.”
― Marlan Rico Lee

“Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.”
― Cree Indian Prophecy

“In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…”
― Egon Schiele

“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.

[Incorrectly attributed to Tolkien. It is a line from the Hobbit movie that did not appear in the books.]”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free. ”
― Emma Lazarus

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore