Melanie > Melanie's Quotes

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I too am here.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”
― Thomas Ligotti , The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

“The Genius Of The Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art”
― Charles Bukowski

“and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing
is so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets ... are interesting?”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.”
― Joseph Heller, Good As Gold

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty.”
― Holly Black, Tithe

“One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.”
― Mark Twain, Roughing It, Vol 1

“The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: the man or woman who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish person, is the most successful.”
― Vivekananda

“Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.”
― Vivekananda

“Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Live for what you love, and die for what you're unwilling to live without...”
― Seja Majeed, The Forgotten Tale of Larsa

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Forgive me... for my love - for ruining you with my love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov