kumar shubham > kumar shubham's Quotes

“Life, Prince Leon, may well be compared with these public Games for in the vast crowd assembled here some are attracted by the acquisition of gain, others are led on by the hopes and ambitions of fame and glory. But among them there are a few who have come to observe and to understand all that passes here. It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“Guilt is a luxury reserved for those still breathing and with no unbearable pain, cold or hunger demanding all their fickle attention. Long as guilt’s your big problem, girl …’ Rikke saw the faint gleam of Isern’s teeth in the gathering darkness. ‘Things can’t be that bad.”
― Joe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred

“You cannot be truly brave unless you feel truly afraid. That’s what courage is. Doing it anyway, even though you’re scared. Sorry, terrified. And you did. You chose to fight. To step into that furnace of blood and madness and pain, and fight. Despite your fear”
― John Gwynne, A Time of Dread

“Faith,” Spook said, “means that it doesn’t matter what happens. You can trust that somebody is watching. Trust that somebody will make it all right.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“We are what we choose to be. What makes a king a king? Is there something different about him? Does special, sacred blood run in his veins? No. He is chosen; he believes it, and the people believe. He rises to the task, or he fails it.”
― John Gwynne, Ruin

“He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone’s got a place in the queue, you can’t get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular.”
― Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“What was the difference between strung-together neurons and a simple bundle of if/then code, if the outward actions were the same? Could you say for certain that there wasn’t a tiny mind in that bot, looking back at the world like a beetle might?”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“Acting all sanctimonious while spouting bad info was a terrible way to win a debate, but a great way to piss people off.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Don’t galaxies receding faster than the speed of light violate relativity theory? Hubble’s law v = Hd implies that galaxies will move away from us faster than the speed of light c if their distance from us is greater than c/H ≈ 14 billion light-years, and we have no reason to doubt that such galaxies exist, so doesn’t this violate Einstein’s claim that nothing can go faster than light? The answer is yes and no: it violates Einstein’s special relativity theory from 1905 but not his general relativity theory from 1915, and the latter is Einstein’s final word on the subject, so we’re okay.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Life is terrifying. None of us have a rule book. None of us know what we’re doing here. So, the easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it. If you believe you have control, then you believe that you’re at the top. And if you’re at the top, then people who aren’t like you … well, they’ve got to be somewhere lower, right?”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“And you know what? They’re fucking right. Because life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn’t matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Then suddenly, we saw the voltmeter flash. “What’s going on?” I asked Scott. “I thought the eel was asleep.” “He is asleep,” Scott answered. And then we both realized what was happening. The eel was dreaming.”
― Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

“The only certainty is that we are here, in this moment, in this now. It’s up to us: to live fully, experiencing each moment, aware, alert and attentive. We are here, each one of us, to write our own story—and what fascinating stories we make!”
― Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning: The true route to happiness

“Teccam said the same thing: no man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“China’s rise is especially instructive for India. It was driving diplomatically in the late 1970s efforts to forge a united front against the USSR. This is in contrast to its reluctance to intervene, even indirectly, in the 1971 Bangladesh conflict despite being exhorted to do so by the Nixon Administration. What changed during this period was a determination to break up the cooperative strand in the ties between the US and USSR that was constricting China’s strategic space. So it utilized both the Vietnam and Afghanistan conflicts to that end. And thus created a favourable political climate for the flow of Western investments. So much so, that even when the Tiananmen incident happened, there were enough advocates abroad to mitigate the damage. Having more than achieved its strategic objectives when the USSR broke up, China altered course and made up with a Russia coming under pressure.”
― S. Jaishankar, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World

“When Fakr Bawni, an incredibly rich merchant from Delhi, offered him all his wealth just so he could have the great honour of just a few moments of audience with His Highness, Balban refused. Bawni was merely a malik-ut-tujjar, the chief of merchants. Meeting such a low man would ‘compromise the dignity of the sovereign’78.”
― Sandeep Balakrishna, Invaders and Infidels (Book 1): From Sindh to Delhi: The 500-Year Journey of Islamic Invasions

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Deep rivers run quiet.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World