Vince > Vince's Quotes

“The best is a tale that has yet to be written.”
― Steven Owen Godersky

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.”
― Voltaire

“To live is to war with trolls.”
― Henrik Ibsen

“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.”
― Avicenna, A Compendiun On The Soul

“We cannot resist everything; we can only choose the forces to which we will submit.”
― Pauline Ashwell

“God is not good, or else he could do better.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”
― Franz Kafka

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
― Thomas Wolfe, God's Lonely Man

“In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person.Raskolnikov had a terrible dream.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.”
― Harlan Ellison

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Science is the only religion of mankind.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

“Pain is a treasure, for it contains mercies.”
― Rumi, مثنوی معنوی

“Although you see the pit, you cannot avoid it.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din, مثنوی معنوی

“Two there are who are never satisfied -- the lover of the world and the lover of knowledge.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din, مثنوی معنوی

“Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“For if not true, they are well imagined...”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“So I had this problem -- work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer.”
― Robert Bloch

“Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.”
― Francis Bacon

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“All life on Earth is subject to the rumbles and rockings of the parent stucture which has no control over the disastrous effects of its stresses and strains on whatever thrives on its surface. The ambitions and dreams of men are irrelevant to this planetary giant which pursues its own way in its own manner. Man is its child, tenant and still, to this date, its captive.”
― Jack Kirby

“A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.

I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.

In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.

I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.

But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
― Isaac Asimov, Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science

“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,
To exist again, it’s enough if I borrow from
Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.”
― Stéphane Mallarme

“The walls are everywhere. Limits. You're not smart enough, not rich enough. You get tired. You die. Some people like to pretend they've broken out. That they're running free. But there's no escape. You have to find a way to live within the walls. And then, they don't matter.”
― James Patrick Kelly

“Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Horla

“One must wait till it comes.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World