Mathieu Avice > Mathieu Avice's Quotes

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
― Jean Racine

“I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.”
― Daphne DuMaurier

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.”
― Francois De La Rochefoucauld

“Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”
― Epicurus, A Guide to Happiness

“I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.”
― Kris Kristofferson

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.”
― Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The path to paradise begins in hell.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”
― Jean Cocteau

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Dear dad,
in consequence of a trivial altercation with a Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, whom I happened to step upon in the corridor of a train, I had a pistol duel this morning in the woods near Kalugano and am now no more. Though the manner of my end can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide, the encounter and the ineffable Captain are in no way connected with the Sorrows of Young Veen. In 1884, during my first summer in Ardis, I seduced your daughter, who was then twelve. Our torrid affair lasted till my return to Riverlane; it was resumed last June, four years later. That happiness has been the greatest event in my life, and I have no regrets. Yesterday, though, I discovered she had been unfaithful to me, so we parted. Tapper, I think, may be the chap who was thrown out of one of your gaming clubs for attempting oral intercourse with the washroom attendant, a toothless old cripple, veteran of the first Crimean War. Lots of flowers, please!
Your loving son, Van

He carefully reread his letter – and carefully tore it up. The note he finally placed in his coat pocket was much briefer.

Dad,
I had a trivial quarrel with a stranger whose face I slapped and who killed me in a duel near Kalugano. Sorry!
Van”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
― W.B. Yeats

“WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.”
― William Butler Yeats

“All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”
― William Butler Yeats

“An intellectual hatred is the worst.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose

“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. ”
― Alfred de Musset

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison