Elena > Elena's Quotes

“A rose is a rose is a rose.”
― Gertrude Stein, The World is Round

“What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.”
― William Shakespeare

“I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
― William Shakespeare , Hamlet

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.”
― Jacques Lacan

“There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you”
― Jacques Lacan

“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l‘autre; vous êtez foutus.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I wonder if there is another couple in the world as much in love as we are.”
― Shen Fu, The Old Man of the Moon

“What a fine day! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”
― Anton Chekhov

“If you wish to be a writer, write.”
― Epictetus

“All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?”
― Bertrand Russell

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Some people are like an open grave:
You give it the thing you love most
And then get nothing in return.”
― Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri, Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets

“And when I think my thinking rouses me to blame he who created me, And I gave peace to my children for they are in the bliss of the abyss
Which surpasses all the pleasures of the world,
And had they been born they would’ve endured misery”
― Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Quatrains of Abu'l-Ala: Selected From His "Lozum-Ma-La-Yalzam" And "Sact-Uz-Zind" And Now First Translated Into English

“This crime was by my father done -To me, but never by me to one." (in regards to life and being born)”
― Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī

“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have nothing but respect for you -- and not much of that.”
― Groucho Marx

“Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series