Dean > Dean's Quotes

“Like most intellectuals he is intensely stupid.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses

“To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
― Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
― Victor Frankl

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.”
― John Ruskin

“It was a mark of Constantine's political genius and flexibility that he realized it was better to utilize a religion(Christianity) that already had a well-established structure of authority as a prop to the imperial regime rather than exclude it as a hindrance.”
― Charles Freeman

“...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.”
― A.C. Grayling, Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God

“Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.”
― Francis Bacon

“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. ”
― Walter Pater

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Essays

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
― Montaigne, Les Essais

“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Man is the cruelest animal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
― Matthew Arnold