Foolsgold > Foolsgold's Quotes

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
― Anne Sexton

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
― Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

“Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
― Emil Cioran

“Next to music, beer was best.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”
― John Cowper Powys

“I suppose if you want a love that will last forever you have to be in love with sorrow.”
― J.R. Salamanca, Lilith

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.”
― Thucydides

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
― Edwidge Danticat

“Never was anything great achieved without danger.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli

“Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.”
― Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors

“Experience is a good school. But the fees are high”
― Heinrich Heine

“All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

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

“Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
― George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

“Sooner or later, all games become serious.”
― J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

“The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”
― Victor Hugo

“Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.”
― Heinrich Heine

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. [...] I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”
― Anne Sexton

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
― Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra