Li > Li's Quotes

“You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Beauty! Terrible Beauty!
A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!”
― Homer, The Iliad

“You must endure and not be broken-hearted.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!”
― Homer

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But deep down she said to herself, Franz maybe strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he's loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give orders.

There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.”
― Bob Dylan

“You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more”
― Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings

“The truth was obscure,
Too profound and too pure,
To live it you had to explode”
― Bob Dylan

“the only thing i knew how to do was to keep on keeping on”
― bob dylan

“The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“...all that is rare is for the rare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Swallow your poison, for you need it badly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives 'unphilosophically' and 'unwisely,' above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”
― Erich Fromm

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. ”
― Erich Fromm

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale,” who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence—briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing—cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Being

“Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.”
― Michelle Obama

“What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.”
― Michelle Obama

“I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.”
― Michelle Obama

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“The course of true love never did run smooth; But, either it was different in blood,
O cross! too high to be enthrall’d to low.
Or else misgraffed in respect of years,
O spite! too old to be engag’d to young.
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,
O hell! to choose love by another’s eye.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream