F > F's Quotes

“If you meet the Buddha, kill him.”
― Línjì Yìxuán

“Keep cool but care”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“E mentre lo Stato e mentre la società e mentre la massa fanno di tutto per eliminare il pensiero, dice Oehler, noi ci opponiamo a questi sviluppi con tutti i mezzi a nostra disposizione, anche se noi stessi per la maggior parte del tempo crediamo all’insensatezza del pensiero, perché sappiamo che il pensiero è piena insensatezza, ma perché – d’altra parte – sappiamo con altrettanta precisione che noi senza l’insensatezza del pensiero non siamo, ovvero non siamo nulla. [...] Di tanto in tanto, però, non possiamo fare a meno, dice Oehler, di adeguarci all’errore, di abbandonarci all’errore e cioè a tutti gli errori in generale e di non essere in assoluto in nient’altro che nell’errore. Infatti, a guardar con esattezza, dice Oehler, tutto è errore, come Lei sa. [...] L’esistenza è errore, dice Oehler.”
― Thomas Bernhard

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty— a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars”
― Seneca

“She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I destini, considerati a posteriori, sono logici”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.”
― James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce