Em Ab > Em's Quotes

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I am always in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.”
― Miriam Elia, The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990–1990

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“They imagine that their poverty is transitory, and that they only need a stroke of good luck to transform them into capitalists.
Education, they think, is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance, that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“Si, déracinant de son coeur le vice qui la domine et avilit sa nature, la classe ouvrière se levait dans sa force terrible, non pour réclamer les Droits de l’homme, qui ne sont que les droits de l’exploitation capitaliste, non pour réclamer le Droit au travail, qui n’est que le droit à la misère, mais pour forger une loi d’airain, défendant à tout homme de travailler plus de trois heures par jour, la Terre, la vieille Terre, frémissant d’allégresse, sentirait bondir en elle un nouvel univers…”
― Paul Lafargue, Le Droit à la paresse: Réfutation du droit au travail, de 1848 [La religion du capital]

“I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Leopard

“Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“They are coming to teach us good manners!" I replied in English. "But they won't succeed, because we are gods.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard