Ingemar > Ingemar's Quotes

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
― René Descartes

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers

“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“If there was anything I'd learned, it's that the man never chooses the woman. All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.”
― Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

“A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition”
― Rudyard Kipling

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.”
― Greg Egan, Oceanic

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.”
― Joss Whedon

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind”
― Timothy Leary

“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.”
― Friedrich Hegel

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence