Quixotic Quotes

“I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“He believed in himself, believed in his quixotic ambition, letting the failures of the previous day disappear as each new day dawned. Yesterday was not today. The past did not predict the future if he could learn from his mistakes.”
― Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam

“You are not a better or wiser person simply because you’ve ceased to care.”
― Clifford Cohen

“Trust is tough since it involves that quixotic mix of integrity, vulnerability, and intimacy. But trust anyway.”
― Jeffrey Fry

“Nothing is ever as it seems nor is it otherwise.”
― The Mediator in The Carpenter

“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”
― Martin Gardner

“I’m just trying to do my part to save the world.”
― J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

“I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice -- at least in my reading -- I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader