Brecht Casper > Brecht Casper's Quotes

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Come to the edge," he said.
"We can't, we're afraid!" they responded.
"Come to the edge," he said.
"We can't, We will fall!" they responded.
"Come to the edge," he said.
And so they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The things you used to own, now they own you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

The only sense to make of tragedies like this is that terrible things can happen to perfectly innocent people. This understanding inspires compassion.

Religious faith, on the other hand, erodes compassion. Thoughts like, 'this might be all part of God’s plan,' or 'there are no accidents in life,' or 'everyone on some level gets what he or she deserves' - these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break at moments like this.”
― Sam Harris

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d”
― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Can you no longer see a road to freedom? It's right in front of you. You need only turn over your wrists.”
― Seneca

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”
― Franz Kafka

“A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend.
If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends.”
― Montesquieu

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world — that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature — but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.”
― Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
― Karl Marx

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving