Nick Harding > Nick's Quotes

“I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.”
― Plato, Apology

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond

“It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”
― Montaigne

“I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.”
― Terence

“Homo homini lupis est.”
― Plautus

“To ravage, to slaughter, to steal, this they give the false name of empire; and where they create a desert, they call it peace.”
― Tacitus

“Something bright and alien flashed across the sky... and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“for the unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

“All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“I am dying beyond my means”
― Oscar Wilde

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”
― Francis Bacon

“It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.”
― Francis Bacon

“Ipsa scientia potestas est.

Knowledge itself is power.”
― Francis Bacon, Meditations Sacrae and Human Philosophy

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy