Renée Paule > Renée's Quotes

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Walk straight ahead
Listen to no one
Trust not in the walls or doorways
For they will mislead
And close behind you
As you walk through
The forest, not knowing
Where you’ve come from
Or where you’re going …
If anywhere at all.”
― Renée Paule, Just Around The Bend: Más o Menos

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”
― John O'hara

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”
― C.E.M. Joad

“I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“A true revolutionary should be ready to perish in the process”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories

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

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I am not interested in being original. I am interested in being true.”
― Agostinho da Silva

“Turn and face the strange changes.”
― David Bowie, Changes Sheet Music

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolucionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“No matter where you go or what you do to distract yourself, reality catches up with you eventually.”
― Kody Keplinger, The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend

“Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.”
― Lao Tzu

“Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit