Ryan Morrow > Ryan's Quotes

“Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.”
― Albert Camus

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
― Joseph Campbell

“To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman

“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Sin is geographical.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know”
― Bertrand Russell

“Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.”
― Bertrand Russell

“It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The Hero Path

We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.”
― Joseph Campbell

“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Collection

“It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space and others

“Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
― Anais Nin

“People change and forget to tell each other.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale