Yk > Yk's Quotes

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”
― Albert Einstein

“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)”
― Albert Einstein

“One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
― Albert Einstein

“A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”
― Albert Einstein

“I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

‘But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

‘The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.”
― Marcel Proust

“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“I'm going on an adventure”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“You may sit home and be safe. But danger and adventure is what makes your life meaningful”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

“You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.”
― Jodorowsky, Alejandro

“I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts. One brief house of madness and joy!”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.”
― John Steinbeck

“Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make.”
― Paul McCartney, The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics

“Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
― Isaac Asimov

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their
own.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis

“Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”
― Andre Gide

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Make gentle the life of this world.”
― Dylan Thomas