Stephen > Stephen's Quotes

“Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.”
― Saul Bellow

“People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.”
― Saul Bellow, Conversations with Saul Bellow

“Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?”
― William Shakespeare

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

“I always advise people never to give advice.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.”
― Karl Popper

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”
― Thomas Sowell