Eftychia > Eftychia's Quotes

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board;
it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.”
― Eugenio Montejo, The Trees: Selected Poems 1967-2004

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

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
― Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

“You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.”
― Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love

“There is such a shelter in each other.”
― Nick Laird

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

“- You look fine.
- Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. ”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Zadie Smith

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? (...) We need the 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 inside us.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“From Pandora's box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardour and that illumination.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters

“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
― Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

“Deserve your dream.”
― octavio paz

“Choices are the hinges of destiny”
― Edwin Markham

“Why love the healthy, confident, proud and happy?They don't need it. They take love as their rightful due, as the duty owed to them, they accept it indifferently and arrogantly. Other people's devotion is just another gift to them, a clasp to wear in the hair, a bangle for the wrist, not the whole meaning and happiness of their lives. Love can truly help only those not favoured by fate, the distressed and disadvantaged, those who are less than confident and not beautiful, the meek-minded. When love is given to them it makes up for what life has taken away. They alone know how to love and be loved in the right way, humbly and with gratitude.”
― Stefan Zweig

“Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
― Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Poems