Bob Dutch > Bob's Quotes

“All bad precedents begin as justifiable measures.”
― Julius Caesar

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Beware the man of a single book.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Round the World! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The desire for knowledge, like the thirst for riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.”
― Laurence Sterne

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Perhaps a film which strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce contribute towards the greater equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth.”
― René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
― Samuel Adams

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“There's something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't even try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.”
― Franz Kafka

“PHILOSOPHER: In short, that ‘freedom is being disliked by other people’.”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

“I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even put a stopper on death.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

“Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.”
― P.G. Wodehouse