JK > JK's Quotes

“From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
― T.S. Eliot

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”
― Wystan Hugh Auden

“But already my desire and my will
were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”
― Dante

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be...”
― Bob Dylan

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.”
― Jack Gilbert

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
― William Butler Yeats

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
― Aesop

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“And following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-- so far,
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“-->

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson
    done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the
    themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

— Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight,” Leaves of Grass. Originally published: July 4, 1855.

”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
― Walt Whitman

“Domestic

If, when studying road atlases
while taking, as you call it, your
morning dump, you shout down to
me names like Miami City, Franconia,
Cancún, as places for you to take
me to from here, can I help it if

all I can think is things that are
stupid, like he loves me he loves me
not? I don’t think so. No more
than, some mornings, waking to your
hands around me, and remembering
these are the fingers, the hands I’ve

over and over given myself to, I can
stop myself from wondering does that
mean they’re the same I’ll grow
old with. Yesterday, in the café I
keep meaning to show you, I thought
this is how I’ll die maybe, alone,

somewhere too far away from wherever
you are then, my heart racing from
espresso and too many cigarettes,
my head down on the table’s cool
marble, and the ceiling fan turning
slowly above me, like fortune, the

part of fortune that’s half-wished-
for only—it did not seem the worst
way. I thought this is another of
those things I’m always forgetting
to tell you, or don’t choose to
tell you, or I tell you but only

in the same way, each morning, I
keep myself from saying too loud I
love you until the moment you flush
the toilet, then I say it, when the
rumble of water running down through
the house could mean anything: flood,

your feet descending the stairs any
moment; any moment the whole world,
all I want of the world, coming down.”
― Carl Phillips, Cortège

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky