Giovanni M. > Giovanni's Quotes

“Le mauvais goût mène au crime.”
― Stendhal

“Love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart; and remember that the true hope of the Noldor lieth in the West, and cometh from the Sea.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be”
― Abraham Maslow

“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live. Do not try to change people; they are only messengers telling you who you are. Revalue yourself and they will confirm the change.”
― Neville Goddard, Your Faith is Your Fortune

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― Cesar A. Cruz

“A genius is the one most like himself.”
― Thelonious Monk

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“It takes a very long time to become young.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

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

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein