Samuel Cleophas > Samuel's Quotes

“Your reason and your passion are your rudder and sails of your seafaring soul, if either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“...the sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head...”
― Primo Levi

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Still waters run deep.”
― Eileen Goudge, Once in a Blue Moon

“There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.”
― Baron Rothschild

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
― Charles Bukowski

“Chance encounters are what keep us going.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Isaac Newton

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
― William Durant

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E. B. White

“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
― Warren Buffett

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”
― Guy Debord

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The Beautiful is always strange.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“It always seems impossible until it's done.”
― Nelson Mandela

“The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.”
― John F. Kennedy

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and
necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
― Dead Poet’s Society

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill