Dave > Dave's Quotes

“It is useless to send armies against ideas.”
― Georg Brandes

“Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.”
― Walter Kaufmann

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“Man is not mean to be humble, he's meant to be humbled.”
― Mike Tyson, Undisputed Truth

“You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.”
― Paulo Coelho

“A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn.”
― Friedrich Durrrenmatt

“God, it would be good to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody.”
― Mike Tyson

“So I think I'd better go, said Wimsey. "I rather wish I hadn't come buttin' into this. some things may be better left alone, don't you think? My sympathies are all in the wrong place and I don't like it. I Know all about not doing evil tha good may come. I'ts doin' good that evil may come that is so embarrassin'."
"My dear boy," said the Rector, "it does not do for us to take too much thought for the morrow. It is better to follow the truth and leave the results in the hand of God. He can forsee where we cannot, because He knows all the facts.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”
― John Waters

“It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.”
― Seamus Heaney, District and Circle

“I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.”
― Joseph McElroy, Lookout Cartridge

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Sid Ziff

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato

“A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Never trust quotes you find on the internet.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they've taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can't understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don't have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”
― Ray Bradbury

“One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
― Carl Jung