“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
| — | F. Dostoyevsky |
“History is the distillation of rumor.”
| — | Thomas Carlyle |
“Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”
| — | W. Whitman |
“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.”
| — | W. Whitman |
“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
| — | Albert Camus |
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
| — | Albert Camus |
“Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.”
| — | Albert Camus |
“Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.”
| — | Albert Camus |
“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate – and quickly.”
| — | Robert Heinlein |
“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
| — | R.W. Emerson |
“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
| — | R.W. Emerson |
“It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.”
| — | R.W. Emerson |
“It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.”
| — | R.W. Emerson |
“»It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.«”
| — | R.W. Emerson |
“I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”
| — | Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield |
“Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.”
| — | Nora Roberts |
“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”
| — | George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion & My Fair Lady) |
“The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche,
occasionally, is to let it rest,
wander, live in the changing light of room,
not try to be or do anything whatever.”
| — | May Sarton |
“There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.”
| — | Henri Matisse |
“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”
| — | Alberto Manguel |
“Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvelous adventure.”
| — | The Temptation of the Impossible, Mario Vargas Llosa |
“The pursuit of truth and beauty
is a sphere of activity in which
we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
| — | Albert Einstein |
