J B > J's Quotes

“And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought,”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“We have a tendency in this country to fall in love with noted personalities, like the drunks who throw their arms around a stranger’s neck, only to push him away again after a while, for equally obscure reasons.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“With great power... comes great need to take a nap. Wake me up later.”
― Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian

“When I was a girl, I dreamt of standing in a room looking at a girl who was and was not myself, who stood looking at another girl, who also was and was not myself. My mother took this for a nightmare. I saw it as the beginning of a career in physics.”
― Rosalind Lutece

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
― Mark Twain

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“We're all so multifaceted, and it's impossible to see all the sides at once.”
― Suzanne Hayes, I'll Be Seeing You

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon

“It's like the idea of him is better than the him of him.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
― Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

“When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive; then they have the parts and they've lost the whole, for the link that's missing was the living soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse. (What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, rather a hammer to shape it.”
― Bertholt Brecht

“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.”
― Abigail Van Buren

“That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.”
― Nietzsche

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
― Machiavelli Niccolo

“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli

“Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“For, in truth, there is no sure way of holding other than by destroying”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History