Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Life is slavery if the courage to die is absent.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“To accuse others for one's own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.”
― Epictetus

“It is a painful thing
To look at your own trouble and know
That you yourself and no one else has made it”
― Sophocles, Ajax

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me”
― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

“the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

“if I examine myself closely enough, I find hints of every objectionable quality known to man.”
― George Alec Effinger, When Gravity Fails

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“If you have nothing to stir you up and rouse you to action, nothing which will test your resolution by its threats and hostilities; if you recline in unshaken comfort, it is not tranquillity; it is merely a flat calm.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. I’ve already mentioned this above. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So,”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.
That is exactly what things were originally made for.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”
― Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories

“Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all”
― Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, The Nose

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.”
― Robert Shea, The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan

“Non nobis solum nati sumus.

(Not for ourselves alone are we born.)”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“In times of war, the law falls silent.

Silent enim leges inter arma”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero