Anda Kruetani > Anda's Quotes

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
― Timothy Leary

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Get going. Move forward. Aim High. Plan a takeoff. Don't just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won't happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you'll love it up here.”
― Donald Trump

“Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them-- that's the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
― Salvador Dali

“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”
― Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“One of the dictums that defines our culture is that we can be anything we want to be – to win the neoliberal game we just have to dream, to put our minds to it, to want it badly enough. This message leaks out to us from seemingly everywhere in our environment: at the cinema, in heart-warming and inspiring stories we read in the news and social media, in advertising, in self-help books, in the classroom, on television. We internalize it, incorporating it into our sense of self. But it’s not true. It is, in fact, the dark lie at the heart of the age of perfectionism. It’s the cause, I believe, of an incalculable quotient of misery. Here’s the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You’re limited. Imperfect. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“About heartbreak my parents gave, separately, the same advice: “You’ve got to feel all your feelings. That way, next time, when you fall in love again, it will be just as meaningful and profound.” “The first heartbreak brings up the pain of the past,” my father said. “The first big loss. Harness it.” “If something is really painful, it’s the undertow of a big, beautiful wave,” my mother said. Other people said, “Get over it,” and “Go out.”
― Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry

“He wanted to make sure the name would be good enough for a whole life of use.”
― Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“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

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
― John Anster, The First Part Of Goethe's Faust

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.”
― Joe Navarro, What Every Body is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People