Asmi Saxena > Asmi's Quotes

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.'
'Why?'
'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here ofr. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet [...] I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. [...] We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. ... The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. ”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

“If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Religion will never show the way.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Do you know the anecdote about Rubens? He was serving Holland as Ambassador to Spain and used to spend the afternoon in the royal gardens before his easel. One day a jaunty member of the Spanish Court passed and remarked, ‘I see that the diplomat amuses himself sometimes with painting,’ to which Rubens replied, ‘No, the painter amuses himself sometimes with diplomacy!”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Artists thrive on suffering.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Only suffering grows big artists.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Weeks passed, Vincent did nothing - just ate, slept or sat staring at one point. [...] He wandered around the neighborhood in order to stretch his legs or just for pleasure. He walked because he was annoyed to lie, to sit or to stand. When he got tired of walking, he was sitting, lying or standing.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“I often find myself in situations where it seems to me like everyone else has read the instruction book”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter

“been there done that, bought the t-shirt"
Chapter 2”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter

“That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Double Dexter

“And I was having too much fun to stop now.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“Me, feeling. What a concept.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“...being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“And so as much as I can, I care about her, dear Deborah. It's probably not love, but I would rather she were happy.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being.
Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO.
The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile.
What a scamp.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“I am one thing, my writings are another.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When God made man she was practicing.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Cat on the Scent

“If women want rights more than they got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.”
― Sojourner Truth

“I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser. ”
― Mother Jones

“The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

“If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment," Murphy interrupted, "I will break your arm in eleven places.”
― Jim Butcher, Changes

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“Society will not crumble if men take a turn at the dishes.”
― Linda P. Rouse