Vladimir > Vladimir's Quotes

“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
― Joseph Stalin

“Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.”
― Andre Maurois

“The bourgeois man is first and foremost fashioned and turned into a machine. He is happy even if he has become only a number in a political sum, and he can be called in every respect perfect if he has transformed himself from a person into a cipher. As it is with the individual, so with the masses. They eat, marry, produce children, become old, and so on to infinity. Pure life simply for the sake of life is the source of baseness, and everything is base that has nothing of the world-spirit of philosophy and poetry.”
― Friedrich Schlegel

“I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.”
― Margaret Mead

“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays”
― Friedrich von Schiller

“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”
― Lewis Mumford

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

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.”
― Émile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise

“I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.”
― Emile Zola

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.”
― Andre Maurois

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
― Emily Dickinson

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
― Montaigne, Les Essais

“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Your library is your paradise.”
― Desiderius Erasmus

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”
― Laurence Sterne

“I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.”
― Montesquieu

“peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science