Lukas Warner > Lukas's Quotes

“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Yesterday is but a dream,
Tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.”
― Kālidāsa, The Complete Works of Kalidasa, Vol. 1: Poems

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds.”
― Dinos Christianopoulos

“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”
― Maxim Gorky

“The unexamined life is eminently worth living, were anyone so fortunate. It would be the life of an animal, brave and alert, with instincts instead of opinions and decisions, loyalty to mate and cubs, to the pack. It might, for all we know, be a life of richest interest and happiness. Dogs dream. The quickened spirit of the eagle circling in high cold air is beyond our imagination. The placidity of cattle shames the Stoic, and what critic has the acumen of a cat? We have used the majesty of the lion as a symbol of royalty, the wide-eyed stare of owls for wisdom, the mild beauty of the dove for the spirit of God.”
― Guy Davenport

“Liberty is a duty, not a right.”
― Benito Mussolini

“While serving one of his countless sentences of imprisonment, he was given ex-wrestler Paul as cell companion. Paul was at that time a dock worker; he was in jail for having, during a strike riot, remembered his professional past and applied the grip known as a double Nelson to a policeman. This grip consisted in passing one's arms through the opponent's arm­pits from behind, locking one's hands behind his neck,
and pressing his head down until the neck vertebra began to crack. In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Time, seeing all things, has found
You out as you did not foresee.”
― Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments

“We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God.”
― Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.

[News conference, April 21 1961]”
― John F. Kennedy

“The step-by-step matching of our internal rhythms—circulation, respiration—to the deliberate universal rhythms that surround, lull, rock, yoke us, is renounced when we set off in an automobile, at an insane speed, to simply cancel out distances, change locations, swallow up miles.”
― Salvador Novo

“ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“As long as you allow your intellectual force to pour out into the absolute, it moves in eddies, its power is dissipated, it is exposed to predatory blasts that disorganize it; but as soon as it is brought back by anxiety to your own mind and you direct it to the enigmatic object close at hand, it condenses, intensifies, becomes useful and penetrating, and brings you positive treasures, to wit, truths that are expressed with all the relief that can make them communicable, accessible to others, hence something which transcends your suffering, your very existence, which broadens and consolidates you, which gives you the only reality that man can reasonably hope to conquer by his own powers, reality in others.”
― Jacques Rivière

“Suddenly the door opened and in stomped a giant reeking of the river, and before anyone knew what was happening, he had grabbed a chair, smashed it in two, and chased the terrified customers into a corner. The three youngsters pressed against the wall like periwinkles in the rain, but at the very last moment, when the man had picked up half a chair in each hand and seemed ready for the kill, he burst into song, and after conducting himself in "Gray Dove Where Have You Been?" he flung aside the halves of the chair, paid the waiter for the damage, and, turning to the still-shaking customers, said, "Gentlemen I am the hangman's assistant," whereupon he left, pensive and miserable. Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holesovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Ricany, then apologized saying he hadn't found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“Ah, so?!’ Ivan said, turning around with a wild and hunted look. ‘Well, then… Goodbye!’ And he rushed head first into the windowblind.

The crash was rather forceful, but the glass behind the blind gave no crack, and in an instant Ivan Nikolaevich was struggling in the hands of the orderlies. He gasped, tried to bite, shouted:

‘So that’s the sort of windows you’ve got here!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.”
― Edward Everett Hale

“Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“I've never found time to indulge more than a single ambition.”
― Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.

“The solution then is to stay distracted.”
― Martin Berkhan

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.”
― Og Mandino

“For most people, most of the time,
drilling deeper isn’t going to actually make much of a difference.”
― Greg Nuckols, The Art of Lifting