Ossian's Dream > Ossian's's Quotes

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“I have loved women even to madness, but I have always loved liberty better.”
― Giacomo Casanova

“I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.”
― Giacomo Chevalier de Casanova

“We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.”
― Casanova

“Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.”
― Casanova

“there is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

“You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“Do nothing that is of no use”
― Musashi Miyamoto, Book of Five Rings

“Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“The student is to read history actively not passively.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Honor is a fool’s prize,” Bane replied, reciting a passage from one of the volumes he had recently read in the archives. “Glory is of no use to the dead.”
― Drew Karpyshyn, Star Wars, The Darth Bane Series: Path of Destruction, Rule of Two, Dynasty of Evil

“Do not let your difficulties fill you with anxiety, after all it is only in the darkest nights that stars shine more brightly.”
― Ali Ibn Abi Talib AS

“Nothing hurts a good soul and a kind heart more than to live amongst people who cannot understand it.”
― Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

“A graceful refusal is better than a lengthy promise.”
― Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

“Our enemies are not the Jews or the Christians, our enemy is our own ignorance.”
― Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

“If the eyes of a female cry over a man that oppressed her, than the Angels will curse him with every step he walks.”
― Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

“Evil? What is that? ...You said you were death itself. Are you evil, then, or are you simply stronger and more awake than others? Who gives more shape to sentient history: the good, who adhere to the tried and true, or those who seek to rouse beings from their stupor and lead them to glory? A storm you are, but a much needed one, to wash away the old and complacent and prune the galaxy of deadweight."

-Plagueis”
― James Luceno, Star Wars: Darth Plagueis