Hugh_Manatee > Hugh_Manatee's Quotes

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do. And if I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“Procrastination has become its own solution - a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success. A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don't have massive consequences when I neglect to do them.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Don't listen to people telling you that getting up early is best. René Descartes is one of history's most important philosophers, but he rarely got out of bed before noon - and when he started getting up early for a new job as a private tutor, it caused him to catch pneumonia and die.”
― Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
― Michel Foucault

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
― Edward W. Said

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
― Michel Foucault

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“A symbolic unity formed by the languor of the fluids, by the darkening of the animal spirits and the shadowy twi­light they spread over the images of things, by the viscosity of the blood that laboriously trickles through the vessels, by the thickening of vapors that have become blackish, deleterious, and acrid, by visceral functions that have be­come slow and somehow slimy-this unity, more a product of sensibility than of thought or theory, gives melancholia its characteristic stamp.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“People who truly love us can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive us our worst sins. Rarely do you find someone capable of both.”
― Jonathan Carroll

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”
― Douglas Preston, The Monster of Florence

“Really it’s vanity to claim that land is your personal property. In a few hundred years you’ll be forgotten and the land will have shrugged you off as if nothing has happened.”
― John Higgs, Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past

“Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you a writer. That’s just commerce.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: NOW A MAJOR FILM

“Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.”
― Irvin Yalom

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call ‘The Great Health’—rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette’s.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales