Mél ☽ > Mél's Quotes

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Deliver thunder, God
If you choose not to talk.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“I’m taller in tolerance than I am in height. Barely. I’m only 6’3, so I apologize for not being more understanding.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.

...The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.”
― Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - what right had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - Oh, God! would you like to lie with your soul in the grave?”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“I was a child in those days, and that jail frightened me. Because I didn't know what men are like. Never again will I believe what they say or what they think. Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.”
― Louis Ferdinand Celine

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished).”
― Nadine Gordimer

“But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time,
place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She
was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.”
― Nadine Gordimer, July's People

“I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“It is dangerous not to conform with people's image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“Last night I suffered so much that there was nothing but my pain to distract me from my pain. I had to make it my sole diversion and with good reason. It had thus decreed. It attacked at every point. Then it distributed its troops. It encamped. It so manoeuvred that it was no longer intolerable at any one of its positions, but tolerable at them all. That is to say that the intolerable being distributed, it was this no longer, except as a whole. It was something both tolerable and intolerable. The organ that breaks down and the final chord that goes on for ever.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

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

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Although according to certain philosophers it is quite difficult to distinguish the jester from the melancholic, life itself being a comic drama or a dramatic comedy.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works

“I do not accept evil. Man is perfect. The soul does not fall. Progress exists. . . . Up till now, misfortune has been described in order to inspire terror and pity. I will describe happiness in order to inspire their contraries. . . . As long as my friends do not die, I will not speak of death.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works

“VINCE: We'd never make it. We'd drive and we'd drive and we'd drive and we'd never make it. We'd think we were getting farther and farther away. That's what we'd think.”
― Sam Shepard, Buried Child

“What’s the easiest way to steal a man’s wallet?”
“Knife to the throat?” asked Inej.
“Gun to the back?” said Jesper.
“Poison in his cup?” suggested Nina.
“You’re all horrible,” said Matthias.
Kaz rolled his eyes. “The easiest way to steal a man’s wallet is to tell him you’re going to steal his watch. You take his attention and direct it where you want it to go. Hringkälla is going to do that job for us. The Ice Court will have to divert resources to monitoring guests and protecting the royal family. They can’t be looking everywhere at once. It’s the perfect opportunity to spring Bo Yul-Bayur.” Kaz pointed to the prison gate in the ringwall. “Remember what I told you at Hellgate, Nina?”
“It’s hard to keep track of all your wisdom.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“إن الصوت الجميل يسرقك من نفسك و يعيدك إليك .. يأخذك و يردك !

أبو حيان التوحيدي”
― أبو حيان التوحيدي

“to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it. And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. So not children touch everything they see? And I!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (English German Edition, illustrated): Die Leiden des jungen Werther

“I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther