AoiBerny > AoiBerny's Quotes

“humans are creatures who give meaning to meaningless actions, and derive purpose from it.”
― Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 上

“Because I think sins are things people individually carry, a burden that we ourselves make for our own fair share. Our sins become heavier the better our wisdom and common sense, and the greater our happiness.”
― Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 上

“There was no end to human desire.
The perfect life was an unattainable dream. The only way to really win was to say with your dying breath that you had truly enjoyed living.” - From Mahoutsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night)”
― Kinoko Nasu

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Everyone had a choice. To lament the little time they had left, or to gamble on it? Perhaps we find things beautiful because they don’t last. Someday, this would all end…but not just yet." - From Mahoutsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night)”
― Kinoko Nasu

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
― Milan Kundera

“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind - of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware that they are deceiving one another. But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception. I myself spent the whole day long deceiving human beings with my clowning. I have not been able to work much up much concern over the morality prescribed in textbooks of ethics under the name as “righteousness.” I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret. If I had only known that one thing I should never have had to dread human beings so, nor should I have opposed myself to human life, nor tasted such torments of hell every night.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“People are riddles.

They want someone else to solve their riddle.
They live life wanting someone to solve the riddle that they are, the most difficult riddle in the world.”
― Ryukishi07/07th Expansion, Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 7: Requiem of the Golden Witch, Vol. 2

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Without love, it cannot be seen.”
― Ryukishi07, Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch, Vol. 1

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
― Stephen King

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“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

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. (You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Now I go alone, my disciples, You too, go now alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you… One pays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers – but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves; and only then when you have all denied me will I return to you… that I may celebrate the great noon with you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”
― Emma Goldman

“Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.”
― Emma Goldman

“There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Any artist must sometimes be filled with an intense pleasure in his work, a sense of its radiant merit, a vision of it as excelling. This is not a matter of comparisons in any ordinary sense. Most artists pay little attention to their contemporaries. Those who nourish them belong to the past. Only the vulgar are anxious when hearing others praised. One's sense of one's own excellence is uninvidious, imprecise, probably healthy, perhaps essential. Equally important is that humility, that sense of unavoidable limitation, which the artist must also feel when he sees, huge behind his own puny effort, the glimmering shade of perfection.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”
― Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

“For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.”
― Stefan Zweig

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings