Alex W > Alex's Quotes

“If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.”
― Alexander Smith

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”
― Michel de Montaigne

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
― William Durant

“One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.”
― Robert Musil

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.”
― Heraclitus

“In the particular is contained the universal.”
― James Joyce

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.”
― Epictetus

“that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books]

“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Per aspera ad astra”
― Latin proverb

“Omnia mea mecum porto.”
― Cicero

“No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”
― Jim Morrison

“Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“A story starts before we encounter it and concludes long after we have turned away.”
― Abbas Kiarostami, Lessons with Kiarostami

“گویند کسان بهشت با حور خوش است
من میگویم که آب انگور خوش است
این نقد بگیر و دست از آن نسیه بدار
کآواز دهل شنیدن از دور خوش است”
― خیام

“Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Дан који је прошао...немој га хвалити,
Сутра што ће доћи... немој га жалити!
На недошлом немој и прошлом градити
Граби сад, немој века свога тратити!”
― Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”
― Albert Einstein

“You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.”
― Xingjian Gao, Soul Mountain

“Što ne boli – to nije život, što ne prolazi – to nije sreća.”
― Ivo Andrić, Znakovi pored puta

“La luz produce los colores: los colores no encienden la luz.”
― Rubén Darío, Azul...

“Usamljen među grobovima, zaboravio sam na mržnju. Vratila mi se kad sam prišao ljudima.”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish