Harmid > Harmid's Quotes

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
― George Orwell

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.”
― Mark Twain, The War Prayer

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
― Mark Twain

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
― Mark Twain

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
― Mark Twain

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
― Mark Twain

“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”
― Mark Twain

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
― Mark Twain

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”
― Mark Twain

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”
― Mark Twain

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”
― Mark Twain

“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”
― Mark Twain

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”
― Mark Twain

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
― Mark Twain

“It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins.”
― Arthur G. Lewis, Stub Ends of Thought and Verse

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
― Mark Twain

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
― Mark Twain

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ”
― Mark Twain

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
― Mark Twain