Ave Timoleon > Ave's Quotes

“I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“The real individuals of our time are the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression, not the inflated personalities of popular culture, the conventional dignitaries. These unsung heroes consciously exposed their existence as individuals to the terroristic annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through the social process. The anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born. The task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be heard, even though their finite voices have been silenced by tyranny.”
― Max Horkheimer

“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”
― Charlotte Bronte

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned”
― Antonio Gramsci

“When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other and I AM only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me; and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of this distinction, one speaks emptily of it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

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

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
― Marcel Proust

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
― Murray Bookchin

“The more these artificial renaissances strive to keep intact the letter of the original doctrines, the more they distort the original meaning, for truth is forged in an evolution of changing and conflicting ideas. Thought is faithful to itself largely through being ready to contradict itself, while preserving, as inherent elements of truth, the memory of the processes by which it was reached. The task of critical reflection is not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore in its relativity.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“Love is the poetry of the senses!”
― Honoré de Balzac

“But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”
― Goethe

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism

“Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.”
― Aristotle

“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”
― Stendhal

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What in inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put a pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honour and money are not to be found in the same purse--honra y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.”
― Germaine Greer

“Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.”
― George Sand, Letters of George Sand

“Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.”
― George Sand

“There is no such thing as happy music.”
― Franz Schubert

“Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time