Personal Quotes (page 95)
He was one of that countless and multifarious legion of vulgar persons, sickly abortions and half-educated petty tyrants who like a flash attach themselves to the current ideas that are most fashionable in order, again like a flash, to vulgarize them, caricaturing the very cause they seek to serve, sometimes with great genuineness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink. I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken--a step. On a journey. To a place. A...
Cory Doctorow
Do you know what constitutes a great poet? He is a person without shame, incapable of blushing. Ordinary fools have moments when they go off by themselves and blush with shame; not so the great poet.... If you really have to quote someone, quote a geographer; that way you won't give yourself away. (p 44)
Knut Hamsun
Find your true path. It’s so easy to become someone we don’t want to be, without even realizing it’s happening. We are created by the choices we make every day. And if we take action in order to please some authority figure, we’ll suddenly wake up down the road and say, “This isn’t me. I never wanted to be this person.
Richard Carlson
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her...
Thomas Hardy
By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as “previously owned”; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it.
Julian Barnes
[Reliija]. o providenci vienkrais cilvks nevar iedomties citdi k vien rkrtgi kpint tva person. Tikai tds var zint cilvkbrna vajadzbas, to var atmaidzint ar savm lgsnm, remdt ar savas uzticbas zmm. Tas viss ir tik acmredzami infantili, tik sves stenbai, ka filantropiski noskaotajam kst spgi domt, ka vairums mirstgo nekad nepacelsies virs s dzves izpratnes.
Sigmund Freud
If the ethical - that is, social morality - is the highest and if there is in a person no residual incommensurability in some way such that this incommensurability is not evil then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had... and what their wisdom amounts to is the beautiful proposition that basically everything is the same.
Soren Kierkegaard
She's not Shimamoto, I told myself. She can't give me what Shimamoto gave. But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.
Haruki Murakami