Maria > Maria's Quotes

“It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“When Kino had finished, Juana came back to the fire and ate her breakfast. They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway. Kino sighed with satisfaction - and that was conversation.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”
― Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Eyes often have an implicit censorious power.22 Post a large picture of a pair of eyes at a bus stop (versus a picture of flowers), and people become more likely to clean up litter. Post a picture of eyes in a workplace coffee room, and the money paid on the honor system triples. Show a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people become more generous in online economic games.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“But now, by saying what his future was going to be like, he had created it. A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a along with other realities-never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . . (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s . . .) —Luis Buñuel”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, “Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

“If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Peggy, just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.”
― Don Draper

“To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.”
― Paul Valery

“Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.”
― Paul Valery

“At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.”
― Paul Valery

“I’ll let you explain me to myself—that sounds intelligent and fantastic. Don’t worry about offending me—that’s quite impossible. .”
― Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Chic, is first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants.”
― Luca Turin

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

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray