Peter Brahos > Peter's Quotes

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“To me, the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places like..uhhh..the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach; going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.”
― Richard Nixon

“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

“The greatness comes not when things go always good for you. But the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
― Richard Nixon

“If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.”
― Richard Nixon

“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
― Richard Nixon

“The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”
― T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Life is too short to read a bad book.”
― James Joyce

“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
― George Carlin

“I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.”
― George Carlin

“When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you get a front row seat.”
― George Carlin

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
― Dorothy Day