Fernando > Fernando's Quotes

“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl

“There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men's sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“He who really wants to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to entertain it with all possible love and to avert his eyes quickly from everything in it he finds inimical, repellent, false, indeed to banish it from mind: so that, for example, he allows the
author of a book the longest start and then, like one watching a race, desires with beating heart that he may reach his goal. For with this procedure, one penetrates to the heart of the new thing, to the point that actually moves it:
and precisely this is what is meant by getting to know it. If one has got this far, reason can afterwards make its reservations; that over-estimation, that temporary suspension of the critical pendulum, was only an artifice for luring
forth the soul of a thing.”
― Neitzsche

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“To remain in the past means to be dead.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank.”
― Jose Ortegay Y. Gasset

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
― Seneca, Seneca's Morals: Of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency

“Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.”
― Nora Roberts, Midnight Bayou

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
― Bill Gates

“Do what you will. Even if you tear yourself apart, most people will continue doing the same things.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“there is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

“Learning never exhausts the mind.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James

“I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”
― Eve Ensler, I Am an Emotional Creature

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
― Erich Fromm

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka