Jonathan Crary > Jonathan's Quotes

“What's the good of living if you don't try a few things?”
― Charles M. Schulz

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley

“For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”
― George Patton

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.” “Freedom? Freedom from worries?” “From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Despair has its own calms.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“A moment's pain can be a lifetime's gain.”
― Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“In business, sir, one has no friends, only correspondents. ”
― Alexandre Dumas

“I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.”
― Voltaire

“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“To dare; that is the price of progress.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Peace is happiness digesting”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A breath of Paris preserves the soul.”
― Victor Hugo

“Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign, to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne; to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! To cause constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory, to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what greater thing is there?"

"To be free," said Combeferre.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I understand only love and liberty.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn