Nick D > Nick's Quotes

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
― George Orwell

“And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”
― George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”
― George Orwell

“Good prose is like a windowpane.”
― George Orwell

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Now, my dear Tuppy, don’t be led astray into the paths of virtue. Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don’t love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.”
― Oscar Wilde

“And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.”
― Chief Seattle

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of the slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”
― Linus Pauling

“When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“So right away I found out something about biology: it was very easy to find a question that was very interesting, and that nobody knew the answer to. In physics you had to go a little deeper before you could find an interesting question that people didn't know.”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. But Dean knew this; he'd mentioned it many times. "I've pleaded and pleaded with Marylou for a peaceful sweet understanding of pure love between us forever with all hassles thrown out — she understands; her mind is bent on something else — she's after me; she won't understand how much I love her, she's knitting my doom."

"The truth of the matter is we don't understand our women; we blame on them and it's all our fault," I said.

"But it isn't as simple as that," warned Dean. "Peace will come suddenly, we won't understand when it does — see, man?”
― Jack Kerouac

“I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”
― George Orwell

“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.”
― Robert M. Pirsig

“God made Himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, He could have chosen *any* of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.”
― Robert M. Pirsig

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.”
― Robert M. Pirsig

“Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?"
"If you take care of it."
"What do you have to do?"
"Lot's of things. You've been watching me."
"Will you show me all of them?"
"Sure."
"Is it hard?"
"Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”
― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

“A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

“A young person still thinks it is possible–there is time enough–to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present