Kao > Kao's Quotes

“She said to me, over the phone
She wanted to see other people
I thought, Well then, look around. They're everywhere
Said that she was confused...
I thought, Darling, join the club
24 years old, Mid-life crisis
Nowadays hits you when you're young
I hung up, She called back, I hung up again
The process had already started
At least it happened quick
I swear, I died inside that night
My friend, he called
I didn't mention a thing
The last thing he said was, Be sound
Sound...
I contemplated an awful thing, I hate to admit
I just thought those would be such appropriate last words
But I'm still here
And small
So small.. How could this struggle seem so big?
So big...
While the palms in the breeze still blow green
And the waves in the sea still absolute blue
But the horror
Every single thing I see is a reminder of her
Never thought I'd curse the day I met her
And since she's gone and wouldn't hear
Who would care? What good would that do?
But I'm still here
So I imagine in a month...or 12
I'll be somewhere having a drink
Laughing at a stupid joke
Or just another stupid thing
And I can see myself stopping short
Drifting out of the present
Sucked by the undertow and pulled out deep
And there I am, standing
Wet grass and white headstones all in rows
And in the distance there's one, off on its own
So I stop, kneel
My new home...
And I picture a sober awakening, a re-entry into this little bar scene
Sip my drink til the ice hits my lip
Order another round
And that's it for now
Sorry
Never been too good at happy endings...”
― Eddie Vedder

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.”
― Frank Ocean

“What's the good of living if you don't try a few things?”
― Charles M. Schulz

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”
― Socrates

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
― Socrates

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
― Socrates

“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

“The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realise that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”
― Tennessee Williams

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
― George Augustus Moore, The Brook Kerith

“Ludwig Wittgenstein once greeted me with the question: »Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: »I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” »Well,« he asked, »what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?«”
― G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The envy I encountered in the business world, however, was nothing compared to what I would see later in the academic world. ‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying.59 There is a certain misery attached to the academic life, no doubt, in which envy plays a considerable part. As Max Weber noted, ‘Do you think that, year after year, you will be able to stand to see one mediocrity after another promoted over you, and still not become embittered and dejected? Of course, the answer is always: “Naturally, I live only for my calling." Only in a very few cases have I found [young academics] able to undergo it without suffering spiritual damage.’60”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma