Luke > Luke's Quotes

“But I do enjoy words—some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experiences of the things they represent—”
― Alasdair Gray, Lanark

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.”
― Frank Zappa

“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.”
― Jim Morrison

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.”
― David Hume

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.”
― Marquis de Sade

“All universal moral principles are idle fancies.”
― Marquis de Sade

“I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out.”
― Frank Zappa

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise.”
― Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”
― Confucius

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live.”
― James Oliver Curwood, The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim 'I do enjoy myself' or 'I am horrified' we are insincere. 'As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror' - it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

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

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa