Joel's quotes

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"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."
— Stephen Jay Gould

13 people liked it

"The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two."
— Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man)

28 people liked it

"Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice."
— Michael Crichton (State of Fear)

tags: fiction, science
126 people liked it

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. "
— Annie Dillard

80 people liked it

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

14 people liked it

"A story untold could be the one that kills you."
— Pat Conroy

12 people liked it

"All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story."
— Isak Dinesen

10 people liked it

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
— Sinclair Lewis

tags: fascism, freedom, politics, religion
314 people liked it

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."
— William Blake

tags: betrayal
62 people liked it

"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. "
— Rita Mae Brown

tags: bad-memory, forgiveness, happiness, memory
89 people liked it

"To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods."
— Anthony Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds)

23 people liked it

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: life, philosophy
3,516 people liked it

"A city is simply a passel of people packed in a pot like pickles."
— David Detzer (Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War)

tags: humor, life, urban
1 person liked it

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

tags: reading
546 people liked it

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: depressing
73 people liked it

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

tags: humour, telekinetics
958 people liked it

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

tags: philosophy
40 people liked it

"It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength. "
— Mary Stewart (The Hollow Hills)

tags: love, secrets, women
105 people liked it

"....we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies."
— Alice W. Flaherty (Neurologia)

tags: brain, creativity, neurology, writing
3 people liked it

"Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong."
— John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization)

tags: ethics, government, morals
8 people liked it

"The path to paradise begins in hell."
— Dante Alighieri

tags: heaven, hell, paradise
14 people liked it

" All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed."
— Richard Adams (Watership Down)

24 people liked it

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
— Mortimer J. Adler

tags: books, reading
41 people liked it

""The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.""
— Mortimer J. Adler (How to Speak How to Listen)

tags: books, great
5 people liked it

"Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in."
— Alan Alda

8 people liked it

"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende

tags: forgotten, writing
177 people liked it

""you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction"
"
— Isabel Allende

44 people liked it

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
— Hannah Arendt

9 people liked it

"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
— Hannah Arendt

tags: education
8 people liked it

"There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous."
— Hannah Arendt

6 people liked it

"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. "
— Hannah Arendt

5 people liked it

"War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford."
— Hannah Arendt

3 people liked it

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
— Isaac Asimov

tags: life, science, wisdom
764 people liked it

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov

tags: humor, writing
414 people liked it

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
— Isaac Asimov

tags: science
212 people liked it

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. "
— Isaac Asimov

66 people liked it

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
— Isaac Asimov

36 people liked it

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."
— Isaac Asimov

36 people liked it

"War is what happens when language fails."
— Margaret Atwood

tags: war
321 people liked it

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
— Margaret Atwood

80 people liked it

"In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity."
— John Barth

5 people liked it

"The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist."
— Charles Baudelaire

27 people liked it

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

tags: poetry, prose, writing
155 people liked it

"I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust."
— Charles Baudelaire

9 people liked it

"It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."
— Charles Baudelaire

2 people liked it

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
— Ambrose Bierce

53 people liked it

"Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret."
— Ambrose Bierce

tags: anger
67 people liked it

"Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary)

tags: cynicism, honesty
19 people liked it

"Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary [Facsimile Edition])

tags: inspirational
19 people liked it

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."
— Ambrose Bierce

23 people liked it

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