Alex > Alex's Quotes

“One man’s destroyer is another’s nightingale.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“Beware of anyone who tries to please you all the time.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“То, чего не можешь заполучить, всегда кажется лучше того, что имеешь. В этом и состоит романтика и идиотизм человеческой жизни.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“[T]his is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes that is it - they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being taken up by with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence;”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“It is pleasant to sit quietly somewhere, in the beer garden for example, under the chestnuts by the skittle-alley. The leaves fall down on the table and on the ground, only a few, the first. A glass of beer stands in front of me, I've learned to drink in the army. The glass is half empty, but there are a few good swigs ahead of me, and besides I can always order a second and a third if I wish to.
There are no bugles and no huge attacks, the children of the house play in the skittle-alley, and the dog rests his head against my knee. The sky is blue, between the leaves of the chestnuts rises the green spire of St. Margaret's Church.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Scars are medals branded on the flesh, and your enemies will be frightened by them because they are proof of your long experience of battle.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“The enemy is not the person standing before you, sword in hand. It is the person standing next to you with a dagger concealed behind his back.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“We stand and gaze. The farmhouse, the remnants of the wood, the heights, the trenches on the sky yonder, — it had been a terrible world and life a burden. Now it is over and will stay behind here; when we set out, it will drop behind us, step by step, and in an hour be gone as if it had never been. — Who can realize it?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“What ever came of the good scholars in the world? —In the hothouse of the school they do enjoy a short semblance of life, but only the more surely to sink back afterward into mediocrity and insignificance. The world has been bettered only by the bad scholars.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“Не следует затевать ссоры с женщиной, в которой пробудились материнские чувства. На ее стороне вся мораль мира.”
― Remarque Erich Maria

“- Никогда, Робби, не стремись знать слишком много! Чем меньше знаешь, тем проще живется. Знание делает человека свободным, но и несчастным. Давай выпьем за наивность, за глупость и все, что к ним относится - за любовь, за веру в будущее, за мечты о счастье - за божественную глупость, за потерянный рай...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“- Ты хочешь знать, как быть, если сделал что-то не так? Отвечаю, детка: никогда не проси прощения. Ничего не говори. Посылай цветы. Без писем. Только цветы. Они покрывают все. Даже могилы.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“But what can you do with another person's beauty? The satisfied lover is as little able to possess the beauty of his beloved as the one who hopelessly observes it from afar.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Those ‘higher’ forms of beauty which are exemplified by art . . . For people who don’t know these works of art the world is a different—and maybe less interesting—place . . . It is what art, and only art, can give.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“The lesson is simple: it may be too late to be spoiled by a parent, but it is never too late to make other people spoil you. It is all in your attitude. People are drawn to those who expect a lot out of life, whereas they tend to disrespect those who are fearful and undemanding.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine.

If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it.

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.

Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.

By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

“You are only punishing yourself when you want to be in a relationship with a woman more than she wants to be a in a relationship with you.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire