Zack > Zack's Quotes

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Having given him the habit of arguing straight and not being taken in by idle words, he had neglected to tell him that in someone who is not highly regarded, this habit is a crime; for all sound arguments cause offense.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life.” No more annual exams, cancer screenings, mammograms, and any other measure “expected of a responsible person with health insurance….Not only do I reject the torment of a medicalized death, but I refuse to accept a medicalized life.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. “For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.”
― Plutarch

“Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.”
― Tacitus

“Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.”
― Plutarch

“They insist upon the shaving of the moustache, I think, in order that they may accustom the young men to obedience in the most trifling matters.”
― Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch

“Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.”
― Edward Gibbon

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.”
― Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom

“He had twice fallen, in sheer abstraction, from his horse.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Many commit the same crime with a very different result. One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown.”
― Juvenal, The Satires

“All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.”
― Juvenal

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.”
― Calvin Trillin

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.”
― Ezra Pound

“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible”
― Frank O'Hara

“Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”
― Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life