harleen > harleen's Quotes

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. ”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Everyone loves a conspiracy.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“...[A]nything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.”
― Dave Eggers

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“No furniture is so charming as books.”
― Sydney Smith , A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith; 2 volume set

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“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

“Life's not about feeling better, it's about getting the job done.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“There is a very great difference — is there not? — between the temporal and the eternal judgments, a very great difference between a man's reputation and a man's character, for reputation is what men think and say of us, while character is what God and the angels know of us.”
― Price Collier

“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”
― thomas paine, Rights of Man

“The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.”
― Thomas Paine

“One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason