Aviral > Aviral's Quotes

“I will be waiting here....
For your silence to break,
For your soul to shake,
For your love to wake!”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don't help.”
― Bill Watterson

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

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
― Rumi, Masnavi i Man'avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula

“If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.”
― Gregory David Roberts

“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with:

"In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing....
Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!”
― C. J. Cherryh

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”
― Anonymous

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”
― Roald Dahl

“The world isn't fair, Calvin."
"I know Dad, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?”
― Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.”
― Charlaine Harris

“I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”
― Bill Watterson

“The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“I had spent the day
friendless, lonely and sad,
a stranger to myself.



After drowning the day
on the sea shore,
I walked back
to my empty house
on the deserted street.



The moment
I opened the door,
the book on my table
flipped its pages
and said:

"Friend,
Where were you
for so long?”
― Gulzar