Leena > Leena's Quotes

“Anyway, it's like with bikes,' said the first speaker authoritatively. 'I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl's bike.'
'Well. You're a girl,' said one of the others.
'That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Associate with people who are likely to improve you.”
― Seneca

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”
― Seneca

“An intelligent person can rationalize anything; a wise person doesn't try.”
― Jen Knox, Chaos Magic

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
― Terence McKenna

“Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“Twas noontide of summer,
And mid-time of night;
And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, thro' the light
Of the brighter, cold moon,
'Mid planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.
I gazed awhile
On her cold smile;
Too cold–too cold for me-
There pass'd, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,
In thy glory afar,
And dearer thy beam shall be;
For joy to my heart
Is the proud part
Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light.”
― Edgar Allan Poe , The Complete Poetry

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“It is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Summary

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think that you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon.”
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.”
― Joseph Joubert

“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”
― Anne Sexton

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“A cup of tea would restore my normality."

[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay]”
― Douglas Adams

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― Jack Kerouac