Nikola > Nikola's Quotes

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“I had no children, I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of our misery.”
― Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“No greater desire exists than a wounded person's need for another wound.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“A ridiculous old age is perhaps the saddest and ultimate surprise human nature may have in store.”
― Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“How long this lasted I can't imagine, it wasn't an imaginary time, it also didn’t belong to the time 
of things that happen.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Nothing calmer than that, a visible circle of calm-and yet, something that immediately made me see something else, not so calm, a calm not soothed, shivering, as though it hadn’t reached the point from which there is no longer any return, as though it wasn’t free, yet, from all faces, still desired one, feared being separated from it: sometimes giving me the feeling of wandering desperately around the face, sometimes the hope of drawing near it, the certainty of recapturing it, of having recaptured it, an unforgettable impression of its unity with the face, even though the face itself remains invisible, a marvelous unity, sensed as a happiness, a piece of luck that dispersed shadows, that went beyond the day, something for which one was prepared to sacrifice everything, a thrilling resemblance, the thrill of the unique, a force of a desire that again and again and again recaptures what it once held-but what is happening? resemblance does not cease to be present behind everything, it even imposes itself, becomes more majestic, I divine it as I have never seen it, it is the moving reflection of all space, and the smile also affirms its immensity, affirms the majesty of this resemblance which is almost too vast, the smile seems to lose itself in the resemblance and through the smile the resemblance seems to become a resemblance that strays, without resemblance.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me

“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“What labels me, negates me.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. ”
― Martin Heidegger

“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Buker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.”
― John Fante

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges