Well Quotes (page 154)
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Humbert Humbert: You know, I've missed you terribly. Lolita Haze: I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. Humbert Humbert: Oh? Lolita Haze: But it doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway. Humbert Humbert: What makes you say I've stopped caring for you? Lolita Haze: Well, you haven't even kissed me yet, have you?
Vladimir Nabokov
We've already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these numerous friends of humanity, and he's ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge - like all the rest of us, though, in that, to be fair; like myself, vilest of all, for I might well be the first to bring the fuel and run away myself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There...
David Hume
And if you expect you'll gain anything from us by your way of approachin' us, you're jolly well mistaken. That's all. Good-night.'
They clattered upstairs, injured virtue on every inch of their backs.
'But - but what the dickens have we done?' said Harrison, amazedly, to Craye.
'I don't know. Only - it always happens that way when one has anything to do with them. They're so beastly plausible.
Rudyard Kipling
It seems to be one of Nature’s laws that the most attractive girls should have the least attractive brothers. Fillmore Nicholas had not worn well. At the age of seven he had been an extraordinarily beautiful child, but after that he had gone all to pieces; and now, at the age of twenty-five, it would be idle to deny that he was something of a mess.
P. G. Wodehouse
what I want you to be - I don't mean physically but morally: you are very well physically - is a firm fellow, a fine firm fellow, with a will of your own, with resolution. with determination. with strength of character that is not to be influenced except on good reason by anybody, or by anything. That's what I want you to be. That's what your father, & your mother might both have been
Charles Dickens
Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. "He talks every language as well as the rest of us," Susy had once said of him, "but at least he talks one language better than the others.
Edith Wharton
Terry cooked for me, but I resented having to do dishes. As I saw it, Terry liked cooking-he enjoyed it, he told me so. Well, I didn't enjoy washing dishes- I hated it, and I'd told him so-and didn't see why I should have to do something I hated after he got to do something he liked. I mean, that wasn't fair, was it?
Dan Savage
One of the less attractive aspects of human nature is our tendency to hate the people we haven't treated very well; it's much easier than accepting guilt. If we can convince ourselves that the people we betrayed or enslaved were subhuman monsters in the first place, then our guilt isn't nearly so black as we secretly know that it is. Humans are very, very good at shifting blame and avoiding guilt.
David Eddings
An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.
Paulo Freire