Torstein Ones > Torstein's Quotes

“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”
― Mark Twain

“To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
― Voltaire

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?”
― Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
― Mark Twain

“I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”
― Orson Welles

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
― Karl R. Popper

“Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre.”
― Philip Roth, Everyman

“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others. ”
― Winston Churchill

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred. ”
― Jacques Barzun

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.”
― Victor Hugo

“Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”
― Edmund Burke

“Every country has the government it deserves.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

“The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
― Jack London