Jorgen > Jorgen's Quotes

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The horror! The horror!”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Facilis descensus Averno:
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.
(The gates of Hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this task and mighty labor lies.)”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Death's brother, sleep.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Et tu, Brute?”
― William Shakespeare , Julius Caesar

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Beware the ides of March.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.”
― arthur schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no
real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
― Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introduction à la psychanalyse

“The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's Philosophical Exploration of Art and Tragedy

“Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy