David McDonald > David's Quotes

“Most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they don't see a thing. Tricking them is as easy as twisting a baby's arm.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The flow of time is always cruel... its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days...”
― Sheik

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

“Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian. They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech. They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations. They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens, a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else. For all these reasons, the growth of education and its first dividend, literacy is a flagship of human progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Nothing is what rocks dream about”
― Aristotle

“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.”
― Fulke Greville

“Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”
― Edmond de Goncourt