Parker > Parker's Quotes

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances, but they did not know it.”
― Jack London, An Odyssey of the North

“Some are dining in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and no be the biggest pygmy he can be? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
― Albert Einstein

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Look, son, if there's one thing I've figured out about life, it's that if you want to be happy, you have to learn to be happy on your own.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

“Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo