Tom Schulte > Tom's Quotes

“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
― Epictetus

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.”
― Ilka Chase

“Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”
― Kingsley Amis

“To generalize is to be an idiot.”
― William Blake

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.”
― Bill Nye

“Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please,
With too much spirit to be e'er at ease,
With too much quickness ever to be taught,
With too much thinking to have common thought:
You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but a rage to live.”
― Alexander Pope, Moral Essays

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.”
― Kevin Durant

“Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

“Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught
How to embody, and to colour thought?”
― William Massey

“With my book in one hand
And my drink in the other
What more could I want

But fame,
Better health,
And ten million dollars?”
― Kenneth Burke

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Dreaming men are haunted men.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body

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

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I lost a world the other day. Has anybody found? You'll know it by the rows of stars around it's forehead bound. A rich man might not notice it; yet to my frugal eye of more esteem than ducats. Oh! Find it, sir, for me!”
― Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa