Annika > Annika's Quotes

“No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.”
― Maya Angelou

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
― Maya Angelou

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Only describe, don't explain.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other and I AM only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me; and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of this distinction, one speaks emptily of it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”
― Immanuel Kant

“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”
― Immanuel Kant

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

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

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstory

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“...nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book...”
― Nickolai Gogol

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“What can you do when your five senses are not enough?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters