Charu Pragya > Charu's Quotes

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“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

“Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition

“Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social Life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“A philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything other except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Every law is an infraction of liberty.”
― Jeremy Bentham

“Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.”
― Jeremy Bentham

“Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.”
― Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings: (Wo Es War)

“...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.”
― Jeremy Bentham

“The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?”
― Jeremy Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Philosophical Classics), The Principles of Morals and Legislation

“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”
― W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

“The quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.”
― Jeremy Bentham

“I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to it.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love Poems

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
― W.H. Auden

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Here is a lesson in creative writing.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country