Oz Sargin > Oz's Quotes

“One does what one is; one becomes what one does.”
― Robert Musil

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”
― Seneca

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“We can no more claim all credit for our achievement than deflect all blame for our impediments.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Life is infinitely more interesting when considered for the questions it raises rather than for the answers it bestows.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come -- ”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Humans act as though we were the creators and masters of language, while in fact language remains the master of us. Perhaps it is, before all else, humankind's distortion of this relation of dominance that drives our nature into alienation.”
― Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking

“Greatness is consistency driven by a deep love of the work.”
― Maria Popova

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
― Cesare Pavese

“Ne sanıyorsun?Ay herkes için vardır,yağmurda,hastalıklar da.İnsan yeraltında da yaşasa,sarayda da yaşasa,kan her yerde kırmızıdır.”
― Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire

“...language is never innocent.”
― Roland Barthes

“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”
― Roland Barthes

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”
― Caleb Carr

“The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.”
― Cesare Pavese

“One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.”
― Cesare Pavese

“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”
― Roland Barthes

“A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Paperback]

“But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”
― Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

“I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?”
― Frank Zappa

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman

“When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.”
― Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.”
― Anthony De Sa, Barnacle Love

“Evde oturmaya o kadar alışmışım ki sanki evden çıkınca gerçek bir dünyada yaşamıyorum.Evin dışında her yer sanki aynı,sanki bütün insanlar birbirine benziyor.Ne acıklı değil mi?”
― Oğuz Atay, Günlük

“Dünyanın en basit, en zavallı, hatta en ahmak adamı bile, insanı hayretten hayrete düşürecek ne müthiş ve karışık bir ruha maliktir. Niçin bunu anlamaktan bu kadar kaçıyor ve insan dedikleri mahluku anlaşılması ve hakkında hüküm verilmesi en kolay şeylerden biri zannediyoruz?”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald