Amy > Amy's Quotes

“You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”
― Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

“You become what you think about all day long.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money – I think that can be a burden – I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.”
― David Hockney, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
― Anaïs Nin, HENRY AND JUNE

“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.”
― Anaïs Nin, HENRY AND JUNE

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
― Sun Tzu

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“My thoughts’, said the wanderer to his shadow, ‘should show me where I stand, but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love ignorance of the future and do not want to perish of impatience and premature tasting of things promised.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“When the opponent expand, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And, when there is an opportunity, I do not hit - it hits all by itself.”
― Bruce Lee

“Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
― E.B. White

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth wil be possible on a basis of kitsch.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“Action is the antidote to despair.”
― Joan Baez

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Never underestimate the fury of an angry mother, Caspar. They're the most vicious creatures in the world.”
― Elizabeth Hunter

“...But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The important thing, Madame, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments.”
― Ferdinando Galiani

“Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

“The fleetest beast to bear you to perfection is
suffering." .”
― Master Eckhardt

“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Limitations foster creativity. Tell an artist to paint anything, and he may struggle, but tell him to create something specific, in a set amount of time, for a certain audience, and these constraints might well push him to produce something he might never have come up with on his own. We grow and evolve by testing ourselves. That’s my personal philosophy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
― Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 9: 1861

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind