Bruce > Bruce's Quotes

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
― William James

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“There are as many sorts of women as there are women.”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“When anything can happen, everything matters.”
― Ian McEwan, Saturday

“Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
― Pauline Kael

“The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”
― J.M. Coetzee

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”
― David Foster Wallace, Oblivion

“Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Excellence does not require perfection.”
― Henry James

“If you never noticed, it never happened.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“I wonder what ants do on rainy days?”
― haruki murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Doing nothing, badly.”
― Graham Greene

“Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
― Henry Miller