Ken > Ken's Quotes

“Plato was a bore.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

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

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“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

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

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

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
― Dr. Seuss

“The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman

“Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Anaïs, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. [...] This is a little drunken, Anaïs. I am saying to myself "here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere." I remember your saying - "you could fool me, I wouldn't know it." When I walk along the boulevards and think of that. I can't fool you - and yet I would like to. I mean that I can never be absolutely loyal - it's not in me. I love women, or life, too much - which it is, I don't know. But laugh, Anaïs, I love to hear you laugh. You are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance - no more, you seem to urge me to betray you. I love you for that. [...]
I don't know what to expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you - even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I even like your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.”
― Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

“Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“I should like to direct the attention of artists. A constant producer, a man who is a "mother" in the grand sense of the term, one who no longer knows or hears of anything except pregnancies and childbeds of his spirit, who has no time at all to reflect and make comparisons with regard to himself and his work, who is also no longer inclined to exercise his taste, but simply forgets it, letting it take its chance of standing, lying or falling -- perhaps such a man at last produces works on which he is then quite unfit to pass a judgment: so that he speaks and thinks foolishly about them and about himself. This seems to me almost the normal condition with fruitful artists.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence”
― Jean Baudrillard

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment... that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?

...I do not maintain that prohibition of sex is a ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Een jaar en twee maanden later, op een nevelige januarimorgen met sneeuw in de lucht van het jaar 1850, zaten de heer en mevrouw Grünlich met hun kleine, driejarige dochtertje in de met lichtbruin hout betimmerde eetkamer op stoelen, die 25 mark per stuk hadden gekost, aan het ontbijt.”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie

“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.”
― Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?