scherzo♫ > scherzo♫'s Quotes

“It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“We got a room full of people here, who weren't given anything. We got a room full of people here who had to fight for what they believe in. We have a room full of people here, who had to reach down deep, and no matter how hard it was, no matter how scary it looked, they found what they needed to find and they brought it up and they took care of the people they love," Warren said, lifting her hand from a downward-pointed forefinger summoning the depths of one's soul to the clenched fist of resolve. "They fought the fights they believe in—that's how they got into these seats today.”
― Elizabeth Warren

“Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in "the imagination," which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn't physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader's? the writer's?) while reading.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“For scientists, reality is not optional.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“There is no such thing as art," he said. "There is only this painting, this piece of music, that sculpture. And it either resonates with you or it doesn't." He paused for a moment and then added, "There is no such thing as art, there are only works."

... In those two moments, Antonioni taught me something profound.”
― Herbie Hancock, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities

“The mind is an activity, not a repository.”
― Jean-Henri Fabre, The Passionate Observer

“Well, suppose we use our brains. We see things solid. Solidities are important to us in nature. In solidities, there are measures that greatly affect us. There are rhythms in the ins and outs of form. Music, the forest and to many the most impressive of arts deals in measures which seem to go in every direction. They combine, they move together, they deflect and they oppose. Music is a structure of highly mathematical measures. According to the selection and relative value of these measures the music is great or small in its effect on us.”
― Robert Henri

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing--and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“The brain can be a wonderful tool, can be a willing slave, as has been evidenced by some men, but of course it works poorly when it has not the habit of usage. An automobile can become a source of delight, but the first time you drive you are as apt to go up a tree as to go up the road.”
― Robert Henri

“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.”
― Niels Bohr

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!”
― Émile Zola, The Masterpiece

“Stop telling God what to do with his dice.”
― Niels Bohr

“When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.”
― Maya Angelou

“Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other….
Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.
”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“There are three principles in a man's being and life:
The principle of thought, the principle of speech,
and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict
between me and my fellow-men is that I do not
say what I mean and I don't do what I say.”
― Martin Buber

“There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”
― Niels Bohr

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
― Martin Buber

“To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.
To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.”
― Henrik Johan Ibsen, Peer Gynt

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.”
― David Mamet

“Analyzing humor is like disecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
― E.B. White