Javir Wright > Javir's Quotes

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.”
― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over.”
― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“            The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country.                   The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after. They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives.”
― Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“you will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw, the epitome of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed. You are useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“Veremos si algun día, algún minero tome un pico con placer y vaya a envenenar sus pulmones con consciente alegría. Dicen que allá, donde viene la llamarada roja que deslumbra hoy al mundo, es así. Yo no sé.”
― Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love - from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonored; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“You Christians studied them,” Settembrini exclaimed, “studied the classical poets and philosophers until you broke out in a sweat, attempted to make their precious heritage your own, just as you used the stones of their ancient edifices for your meeting houses. Because you were well aware that no new art could come from your own proletarian souls and hoped to defeat antiquity with its own weapon. And so it will be again, so it will always be. And you with your crude visions of a new morning will likewise have to be taught by those whom—so at least you would like to persuade yourselves, and others—you despise. For without education you cannot prevail before humanity, and there is only one kind of education—you call it bourgeois, but in fact it is human.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Al igual que el tiempo, el espacio trae consigo el olvido; aunque lo hace desprendiendo a la persona humana de sus contingencias para transportarla a un estado de libertad originaria; incluso del pedante y el burgués hace, de un solo golpe, una especie de vagabundo. El tiempo, según dicen, es Lete, el olvido; pero también el aire de la distancia es un bebedizo semejante, y si bien su efecto es menos radical, cierto es que es mucho más rápido.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Nuestra muerte es más un asunto de los que nos sobreviven que de nosotros mismos. Tanto si recordamos eso o no por el momento, esas palabras de un sabio malicioso son, en todo caso, valederas para el alma: "Mientras existimos, la muerte no existe, y, cuando la muerte existe, no existimos nosotros", por consiguiente, entre la muerte y nosotros no hay ninguna relación real; es una cosa que no nos atañe absolutamente en nada, que atañe todo lo mas al mundo y la naturaleza, y por eso todos los seres la contemplan con una gran tranquilidad y una incidencia egoísta.”
― Thomas Mann, La montaña mágica

“Aimer... aimer... Qu'est-ce que c'est? Qa manque de définition, ce mot-là. Was der eine hat, liebt der andere, comme nous Allemands disons proverbialment.”
― Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg

“Love . . . love. What is it, exactly? The word lacks definition. What one man has, the other loves, as the German proverb puts it”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means