Niloo Inalouei > Niloo's Quotes

“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“O sancta simplicitiatas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel. How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences! —how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety— in order to enjoy life!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on secondary questions, he said, while forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you yourself are?”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“I think I know something, but how can I know that I know what I know?”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café

“We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“It’s like us humans sending rockets up to the moon only to spend the next fifty years gazing at the pictures of our own earth.”
― Fiona Mozley, Elmet

“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!--so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful.”
― Winfried Georg Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“I like imagining your body is Saturn,
my body ten thousand rings wrapped around you.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it”
― Vaclav Havel

“Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not. ”
― Vaclav Havel

“It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.” —Vaclav Havel”
― J.J. McAvoy, The Untouchables

“Ideology offers human beings the illusion of dignity and morals while making it easier to part with them.”
― Václav Havel

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
― John Williams, Stoner

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”
― John Williams, Stoner