Cameron Smith > Cameron's Quotes

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Sanity is not statistical.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”
― Herman Melville

“I am a sick man....I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”
― A.P. Chekhov

“Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”
― Anton Chekhov

“If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.”
― Anton Chekhov

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
― Herman Melville

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Fiction is empathy technology.”
― Steven Pinker

“All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Every act, says Thich Nhat Hanh, should be a ritual of mindfulness awakening us to our true identity of interbeing. “True mind is our real self, is the Buddha: the pure one-ness which cannot be cut up by the illusory divisions of separate selves, created by concepts and language” (Naht Hanh, 1975, p. 42).”
― Darrell J. Fasching, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics

“No mud, No lotus”
― Thich Naht Hanh

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help.’ – Thich Naht Hanh”
― Emma Sadleir, Selfies, Sexts and Smartphones: A Teenager’s Online Survival Guide

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
― Herman Melville

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.”
― Steven Pinker

“Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature