Kazoo > Kazoo's Quotes

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
― William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

“When I was a boy of seven or eight I read a novel untitled "Abafi" — The Son of Aba — a Servian translation from the Hungarian of Josika, a writer of renown. The lessons it teaches are much like those of "Ben Hur," and in this respect it might be viewed as anticipatory of the work of Wallace. The possibilities of will-power and self-control appealed tremendously to my vivid imagination, and I began to discipline myself. Had I a sweet cake or a juicy apple which I was dying to eat I would give it to another boy and go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied. Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day by day from morning till night. At first it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
― William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“Good composition is like a suspension bridge, each line adds strength and takes none away.

Thus a work of art is finished from the beginning, as Whistler has said.

If there are only ten lines, then they are the ten lines which comprehend the most.

Composition is the freedom of a thing to be its greatest best by being in its right place in the organization. It is a just sense of the relation of things.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Do not practice finely skilled movements after you are tired, for you will begin to substitute gross motions for finer ones and generalized efforts for specific ones. Remember, wrong movements tend to supervene and the athlete's progress is set back. Thus, the athlete practices fine skills only while he is fresh. When he becomes fatigued, he shifts to tasks employing gross movements designed principally to develop endurance.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”
― Henry James, The art of fiction

“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”
― Max Stirner

“One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation.”
― Sir Walter Scott

“It may sometimes happen that a truth, an insight, which you have slowly and laboriously puzzled out by thinking for yourself could have easily have been found already written in a book: but it is a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself. For only then will it enter your thought system as an integral part and living member, be perfectly and firmly consistent with it and in accord with all its other consequences and conclusions, bear the hue, colour and stamp of your whole manner of thinking, and have arrived at just the moment it was needed ; thus it will stay firmly and forever lodged in your mind.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
― Samuel Johnson

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.”
― William Blake

“A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Rambler: In Four Volumes

“He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.”
― Andre Dubus

“All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.”
― Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else...”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“As in everything, nature is the best instructor.”
― Adolf Hitler

“There are people who want to know about everything in the minutest detail, like accountants or lawyers. But show a toe sticking out of a hole in a sock to a poet and it is enough to produce an image of the whole world in him.”
― Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“If I could see and really understand the essence of the life that is right around me I could with even such technique as I now command make masterpieces.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism”
― Max Scheler, Ressentiment