Littlevision > Littlevision's Quotes

“If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself”
― A.S. Neill

“The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavour to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”
― Hermann Hesse

“There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!”
― Bill Maher

“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“Sorry Maureen.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“[H]e never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain.”
― Hermann Hesse

“I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“A friend said, "Ah, I get it. All of my life I have gone into every next event asking, in effect, What's in it for me? Now I see that what I must do is go into every event asking, What can I do for them?" And my friend had grievously missed the point. The great discovery is that we have nothing to give at all to anyone, anywhere.”
― Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child

“The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best”
― A.S. Neill

“I have this idea that every time we discover that the names we're being called are somehow keeping us less than free, we need to come up with new names for ourselves, and that the names we give ourselves must no longer reflect a fear of being labeled outsiders, must no longer bind us to a system that would rather see us dead.”
― Kate Bornstein, Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Harriet was silent, thinking, and then she said, "It is too hard to be a person. You don't only have to go on and on. You have to be--" she looked for the word she needed and could not find it. Then, "You have to be tall as well," said Harriet.”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“You are born, you are a he or a she, and you live until you die... Willy-nilly.”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“Harriet told her, 'Captain John was so brave. He stayed there in the battle until his leg was shot off.' Victoria's brown eyes rested thoughtfully on Captain John. "Why didn't he stay until the other leg was shot off?' she asked. But he still seemed to like Victoria best.”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“So many grown-up people seem to be nothing very much.”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“Funny,' said Harriet to herself. 'The world goes on turning, and it has all these troubles in it.”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“Sometimes,' she said, remembering that morning, 'I write poems that are taller than I am”
― Rumer Godden, The River

“We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we are born.”
― Albert Einstein