All Things Quotes (page 116)
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We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Oscar Wilde
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that...
Oscar Wilde
We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a...
Richard P. Feynman
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for...
Richard Dawkins
When I was younger all kinds of people talked to me,” she
said. “Told me all sorts of things. Fascinating stories, beautiful,
strange stories. But past a certain point nobody talked to me
any more. No one. Not my husband, my child, my friends …
no one. Like there was nothing left in the world to talk about.
Sometimes I feel like my body’s turning invisible, like you can
see right through me.
Haruki Murakami
In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed...
Cormac McCarthy
Mama, you don’t understand. It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t acept. It’s not important. I an not going out and commit crimes or be immoral because I don’t believe in God. I don’t even think about it. It’s just that I get so tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no God! There is only Man, and it’s he who makes miracles!
Lorraine Hansberry
The rosy hearth, the lamplight's narrow beam, The meditation that is rather dream, With looks that lose themselves in cherished looks; The hour of steaming tea and banished books; The sweetness of the evening at an end, The dear fatigue, and right to rest attained, And worshipped expectation of the night? Oh, all these things, in unrelenting flight, My dream pursues through all the vain delays, Impatient of the weeks, mad at the days!
Paul Verlaine
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say...
Frederic Bastiat
This world,' she said. 'Do you really like it?'
What a question! Farid never asked himself such things. He was glad to be with Dustfinger again and didn't mind where that was.
It's a cruel world, don't you think?' Meggie went on. 'Mo often told me I forget how cruel it is too easily.'
With his burned fingers, Farid stroke her fair hair. It shone even in the dark. 'They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the...
Cornelia Funke
he saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings? all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or...
Jack Kerouac