James Martin > James's Quotes

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
― Pablo Picasso

“That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
― George Carlin

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).”
― Sam Harris

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

“I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

“Photoshop is just like makeup. When it’s done well it looks great, and when it’s overdone you look like a crazy asshole.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.”
― Philip Larkin

“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”
― Philip Larkin

“Originality is being different from oneself, not others.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.”
― Euripides

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit.
Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.
What is anything in life compared to peace of soul?”
― Francis de Sales

“It is a fact that people are always well aware of what is due them. Unfortunately, they remain oblivious of what they owe to others.”
― St. Francis de Sales

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.”
― Francis de Sales

“The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays