Zach Smith > Zach's Quotes

“(N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.”
― Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Damn the Absolute!”
― William James

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Thoughts are only thoughts.They are not you, you belong to yourself even when your thoughts don't.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“To live content with small means.

To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.

To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.

To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all
cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions,
hurry never.

In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.

This is to be my symphony.”
― William Henry Channing

“Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth. This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life. To denounce Nazism for intolerance, cruelty and stimulation of hatred amounts to fostering insincerity if, in our personal relations to other persons, if, in our daily walk and conversation, we are moved by racial, color or other class prejudice; indeed, by anything save a generous belief in their possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment. The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.”
― John Dewey

“America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.”
― George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

“Bakunin had a simple formula that captures the ethos of libertarian socialists: We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. Liberty without socialism means rule by CEOs, socialism without liberty means rule by bureaucrats.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“To be on brand is to be 100% certain of who you are and what you do, and certainly, in art and in life, is not only completely overrated, it is also a roadblock to discovery. Uncertainty is the very thing that art thrives on.”
― Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

“We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on.”
― Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

“Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
― William James, The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition

“The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.”
― Rollo May

“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing “about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“You have to carry the fire."
I don't know how to."
Yes, you do."
Is the fire real? The fire?"
Yes it is."
Where is it? I don't know where it is."
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.”
― Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights

“The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.”
― Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights