Chanel Earl > Chanel's Quotes

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“A game master or teacher who was primarily concerned with being close enough to the "innermost meaning" would be a very bad teacher. To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the "meaning" of music; if there is one it does not need my explanations. On the other hand I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for the "meaning" but do not imagine that it can be taught.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.”
― Joseph Smith

“Might does not make right! Right makes right!”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

“People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. ”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“At the end of things, The Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.” And the lost will say, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”
― J.D. Salinger

“Ein Planet kreist aufgrund der Schwerkraft um die Sonne, und der Mond zieht das Meer an, und so entstehen Ebbe und Flut.'

Das wuste ich sehr wohl, aber dann sagte er:

Meinst du nicht, dass es auch eine Kraft geben muss, die uns aus dem Meer gezogen und uns Augen zum sehen und einem Kopf zum denken gegeben hat?'

Ich wusste nicht, was ich sagen sollte, und deshalb zuckte ich nur mit den schultern.

Ich wuesste gern, ob denen, die es nicht glauben, ein wichtiger sinn fehlt,' sagte Mika ganz zum schluss.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Hello? Is Anybody There?

“Denn sie wollte nicht, dass er sie weinen saehe. Es war eine so stolze Blume.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Der Kleine Prinz

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

“You didn't kill him. He would have killed you, but you didn't kill him."
"So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.”
― Tamora Pierce, In the Hand of the Goddess

“Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
― Don Marquis

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”
― Anne Fadiman