Maxwell > Maxwell's Quotes

“Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.”
― Edward Said

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”
― Edward W. Said

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.”
― Edward Said

“I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.”
― Edward Said

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“If you aren't rich you should always look useful.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“A great man is always willing to be little.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“if Stavrogin believes, he does not believe that he believes. And if he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.”
― Franz Kafka

“That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night