Jepa > Jepa's Quotes

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
― Spinoza

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
― Spinoza

“Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.”
― Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

“There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.”
― Benedictus de Spinoza

“I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.”
― Hippolyte Taine

“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
― Epictetus

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."

(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008)”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I think people are very brave and often are a lot more frightened than they're allowed to admit. Life is much harder to live for most people than we want to admit. And so many things take a summoning up of courage. It makes one's own life a little bit easier when you can acknowledge that.
-Ursula LeGuin, interviewed by”
― Brenda Peterson, Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening

“It had never occured to me that thinking and music are so much alike. In fact, you can say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music. ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl thinks long.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Catwings

“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea