Arij > Arij's Quotes

“I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such”
― Henry Miller

“Live with your century, but do not be its creature.”
― Friedrich Schiller

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
― Leon C. Megginson

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“No bird ever looked at a plane in envy”
― Iain Thomas, 25 Love Poems for the NSA

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“عندما يبدأ شخص ما بتنازلات صغيرة, فإن الحياة تفقد كل معناها في النهاية .”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“You can't save a person who doesn't want to be saved. It was like Mr. Eddie always told the new gardeners: Everybody's got to kill their own snakes.”
― Pearl Cleage, Till You Hear from Me

“I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“إنهم يريدون أن يفتحوا العالم وهم عاجزون عن فتح كتاب
ويريدون أن يخوضوا البحر وهم يتزحلقون بقطرة ماء
ويبشرون بثورة ثقافية تحرق الأخضر واليابس ، وثقافتهم لاتتجاوز باب المقهى الذي يجلسون فيه ، وعناوين الكتب المترجمة التي سمعوا عنها”
― نزار قباني, الكتابة عمل انقلابي

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore