Liam > Liam's Quotes

“Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”
― Terry Pratchett, Snuff

“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
― Terry Pratchett, Snuff

“Personal isn't the same as important.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“There's no need to imagine that you're a wondrous beauty, because that's what you are.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

“There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“Real strength has to do with helping others.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.”
― Virgil

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Not only must a warrior be strong with his bow, but he must have a heart full of pity for all living creatures.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa

“Although
the cricket's song
has no words,
still,
it sounds like sorrow.”
― Izumi Shikibu, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

“To emancipate woman, is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts, or the parliaments to her, for the "emancipated" woman will always throw her domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life. It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.”
― Piotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“Soms ben ik het sterkste wijf ter wereld en soms ben ik een kwartelei.”
― Griet Op de Beeck, Kom hier dat ik u kus

“People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“It is easy to crush an enemy outside oneself but impossible to defeat an enemy within.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

“The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Enemies were teachers in disguise.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road