Amit > Amit's Quotes

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
― Mark Twain

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

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

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
― Mark Twain

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

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

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
― Mark Twain

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ”
― Mark Twain

“The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”
― Mark Twain

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity.By standing outside the huddles of man,he sees a lot,and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are.And he wants to see it time and again.In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries,he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“So what is truth, then ?’
‘Truth is a successful delusion.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“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

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
― William Faulkner

“A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. ”
― William Faulkner

“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.”
― Alice Munro