Idontknow > Idontknow's Quotes

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Hate is a place where a man who can't stand sadness goes.”
― Kentaro Miura

“We all have names we don't know about.”
― Martin Amis

“Capital requires the separation of the worker from the means of production and subsistence”
― Peter Linebaugh, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”
― Zhuangzi, Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance.”
― Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

“We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“When in doubt, head into the wind.”
― Max Brand, Gunman's Reckoning

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

“To be a true hero you must be a true Christian. To sum up then, heroism is largely based on two qualities- truthfulness and unselfishness, a readiness to put one's own pleasures aside for that of others, to be courteous to all, kind to those younger than yourself, helpful to your parents, even if helpfulness demands some slight sacrifice of your own pleasure. . .you must remember that these two qualities are the signs of Christian heroism.”
― G. A. HENTY

“I dream in fire but work in clay.”
― Arthur Machen

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“Show me a happy man and I will show you a man who is getting nothing accomplished in this world.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“a man can free his soul only by exhausting his body.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“To put up with people, to keep open house with one's heart — that is liberal, but that is merely liberal. One recognizes those hearts which are capable of noble hospitality by the many draped windows and closed
shutters, they keep their best rooms empty. Why? Because they expect guests with whom one does not "put up.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“My conception of freedom. - The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug - it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray