Robert > Robert's Quotes

“I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“What labels me, negates me.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”
― Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
― James Baldwin

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ”
― James Baldwin

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― James Baldwin

“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”
― James Baldwin, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.”
― James Baldwin

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.”
― Leonard Woolf

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? ”
― Virginia Woolf

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.”
― James A. Garfield

“There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It really matters very little whether they are behind the wheel of a truck or running a business or bringing up a family. The teach the truth by living it.”
― James A. Garfield

“We should do nothing for revenge, but everything for security: nothing for the past; everything for the present and the future.”
― James A. Garfield

“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.”
― James A. Garfield

“I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“We all see only that which we are trained to see.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati