Steven Lee > Steven's Quotes

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
― Herman Melville

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
― Herman Melville

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love, I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years, but I would eat them.”
― Johnny Depp

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”
― Maxim Gorky

“When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery!”
― Maxim Gorky

“There is nothing that sharpens a man's senses so acutely as to know that bitter and determined enemies are in pursuit of him night and day”
― Frederick Russell Burnham

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Everything passes, only truth remains.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
― Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
― Thomas Jefferson