Ali > Ali's Quotes

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

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

“Never compete with someone who has nothing to lose.”
― Baltasar Gracian

“A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”
― Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“The best skill at cards is knowing when to discard.”
― Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
― Mark Twain

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain

“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”
― Mark Twain

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
― Mark Twain

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
― Mark Twain

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
― Mark Twain

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
― Mark Twain

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
― Mark Twain

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
― Mark Twain

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
― Mark Twain

“April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
― Stanisław Jerzy Lec

“Because we don't have much time together, I will give you as much love in a year as I could give you in a lifetime.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Métaphysique des tubes

“Water beneath me, water above me, water in me--I was water. How appropriate that the one definition of the Japanese character for my name was "rain." I, too, was precious and copious, inoffensive and deadly, silent and raucous, joyous and despicable, live-giving and corrosive, pure and grasping, patient and insidious, musical and off-key--but more than any of that, and beyond all those things, I was invulnerable.
...From the heights and depths of my diluvian life, I knew that I was rain and rain was rapture. Some realised it would be best to accept me, let me overwhelm them, let me be who I was. There was no greater luxury than to fall to earth, in sprinkles or in buckets, lashing faces and drenching countryside, swelling sources and overflowing rivers, spoiling weddings and consecrating burials, the blesssing and curse of the skies.
My rainy childhood thrived in Japan like a fish in water.
Tired of my unending passion for my element, Nishio-san would finally call to me, "Out of the lake! You'll dissolve!"

Too late. I had dissolved long before.”
― Amelie Nothomb

“Il n'y a rien de gentil à laisser de faux espoirs. L'ambiguïté est la source de la douleur.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
― Montaigne, Les Essais

“Pain or love or danger makes you real again....”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
― William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

“Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.”
― William Faulkner

“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History