Joey > Joey's Quotes

“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”
― Anton Chekhov

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they - friends from childhood - had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over.... But those tears were pleasant to them both.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“He was swept by a lovely, heart-warming sensation that was quite new to him; the sight of those two little girls had suddenly made him aware that there were such things as other human interests, million miles from his own but no less legitimate.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“According to the biblical tradition the absence of work -- idleness -- was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men -- the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир

“On earth, here on this earth, there is no truth, all is false and evil; but in the universe, in the whole universe there is a kingdom of truth, and we who are now the children of earth are—eternally—children of the whole universe. Don’t I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious whole? Don’t I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the Deity—the Supreme Power if you prefer the term—is manifest? If I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should i suppose it breaks off at me and does not go father and father? I feel that I cannot vanish, since nothing vanishes in this world, but that I shall always exist and always have existed. I feel that beyond me and above me there are spirits, and that in this world there is truth”
― Leo Tolstoy

“... and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself, not in relation to the living world, or any effect it might have on other people, but purely in relation to himself and his own soul, and it seemed so vivid, almost a dependable certainty, stark and terrible. And from the heights of this vision everything that had once tormentingly preoccupied him seemed suddenly bathed in a cold, white light with no shadows, no perspective, no outline. His whole life seemed like a magic-lantern show that he had been staring at through glass by artificial light. Now suddenly the glass was gone, and he could see those awful daubings in the clear light of day. 'Yes, yes, here they are, these false images that I used to find so worrying, enthralling and agonizing,' he told himself, giving his imagination a free rein to run over the main pictures in the magic lantern of his life, looked anew in the cold, white daylight brought on by a clear vision of death. 'Here they are, these crudely daubed figures that used to seem so magnificent and mysterious. Honour and glory, philanthropy, love of a woman, love of Fatherland -- how grand these pictures used to seem, filled with such deep meanings! And now it all looks so simple, colourless and crude in the cold light of the morning I can feel coming upon me.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Pierre's madness simply meant that he didn't wait, as in days gone by, for people to show personal qualities, what he might call virtues, before loving them. With his heart overflowing with love he loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk

“A person who has forgotten his sorrows can be forced to confront them once more when someone with the best intentions favors him with a word of comfort.”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk

“She put her free hand briefly across his round cheek. To touch like this was permitted here, among these stateless people, where the rules were unknown and in any case suspended.”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful. However much she thought of to tell, however the words flowed in her head as she performed her chores, despite the emotion that swelled and throbbed while the storylines formed, the telling was inevitably brief and blunt, a poor thing, stunted as a failed crop.”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“Life made its pattern around and beneath and through her.”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“Sometime when people see a beautiful thing they want to destroy it. The thing make them feel ugly so they act ugly.”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“But this was part of the deal when you were friends with Jude: he knew it, Andy knew it, they all knew it. You let things slide that your instincts told you not to, you scooted around the edges of your suspicions. You understood that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“That is god... A shout in the street,' Stephen answered...”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.”
― Maya Angelou

“Once you learn the maze or see the labyrinth whole, then, elaborate chaos is transformed into pattern.”
― Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages

“Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both;”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“So true it is, that man’s mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man

“We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”
― Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year