HerbDaisy > HerbDaisy's Quotes

“I strive to be like the sun sitting in the middle of the solar system with all the planets spinning around it — millions of things going on. It's just sitting there being the sun, but exerting gravitational effect on everything. I think man should look at himself that way.”
― The RZA

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
― William Faulkner

“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”
― Alain de Botton

“For me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.”
― Stephen King, Nightmares and Dreamscapes

“The moments of our life are not expendable, And the [possible] circumstances of death are beyond imagination. If you do not achieve an undaunted confident security now, What point is there in your being alive, O living creature?”
― Padmasambhava, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. First Complete Translation

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“The very reason for nature's existence is for the education of the soul.”
― Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga: the Yoga of Action

“Change is freedom, change is life.

It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.

There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”
― Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvellous work. It is fear that is the great cause of misery in the world. It is fear that is the greatest of all superstitions. It is fear that is the cause of all our woes, and it is fearlessness that brings heaven even in a moment. Therefore, "arise, awake and stop not until the goal is reached.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.”
― D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Sooner or later, all games become serious.”
― J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

“For a few seconds Oskar saw through Eli's eyes. And what he saw was...himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love." (Let the Right One In)”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself......”
― Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“A friend is a gift you give yourself.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“I open my mind in the ritual of death”
― Katherine Applegate, The Andalite Chronicles

“Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level”
― Gustave Flaubert, November