Matt's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 52)

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

tags: philosophy
27 people liked it

"...the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions."
— Heinrich Hertz (The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form)

tags: philosophy
1 person liked it

"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
"
— Samuel Beckett

tags: death, life, regret
4 people liked it

"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music. "
— John Keats

tags: change, chaos, music, stability
1 person liked it

"Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

104 people liked it

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

98 people liked it

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

tags: god, grief, night
78 people liked it

"To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

64 people liked it

"The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

tags: humanity, mankind, the-brothers-karamazov
41 people liked it

"A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction."
— Leo Tolstoy

25 people liked it

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

tags: humanity, nothing, wisdom
26 people liked it

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

tags: perfection
20 people liked it

"Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

tags: death, inspirational
14 people liked it

"If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed."
— Leo Tolstoy

tags: inspirational
15 people liked it

"Touch has a memory."
— John Keats

tags: memory, touch
23 people liked it

"Life is but a day:
A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way
From a trees summit"
— John Keats

tags: beauty, life, time
16 people liked it

"I want a brighter word than bright"
— John Keats

13 people liked it

"Candor disarms paranoia."
— Allen Ginsberg

8 people liked it

"I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view. "
— Allen Ginsberg

6 people liked it

"Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening."
— Allen Ginsberg

tags: writing
5 people liked it

"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal."
— John Steinbeck

tags: politics, war
132 people liked it

"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people."
— John Steinbeck

85 people liked it

"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

71 people liked it

"Anything that just costs money is cheap."
— John Steinbeck

tags: value
56 people liked it

"All great and precious things are lonely."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

tags: loneliness
32 people liked it

"There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road: The Original Scroll)

113 people liked it

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

tags: dharma, simplicity, writing
286 people liked it

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
— Jack Kerouac

189 people liked it

"The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

82 people liked it

"My witness is the empty sky."
— Jack Kerouac

46 people liked it

"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."
— Jack Kerouac

tags: poetry
38 people liked it

"But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things."
— Jack Kerouac

34 people liked it

"It all ends in tears anyway."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

31 people liked it

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

tags: crisis, life
85 people liked it

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

tags: moon, writing
121 people liked it

"Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

10 people liked it

"When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

7 people liked it

"God forbid you should sacrifice the present for the future! There is youth, health, fire in the present; the future is smoke and deception!"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

8 people liked it

"Madness is the acme of intelligence.
"
— Naguib Mahfouz

tags: genius, intelligence, madness, mahfouz, naguib
17 people liked it

"“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”"
— Naguib Mahfouz

8 people liked it

"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power--he's free again."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

4 people liked it

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

4 people liked it

"Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956)

tags: career, corporate, vocation
4 people liked it

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart"
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

2 people liked it

"A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

3 people liked it

"The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (Cancer Ward)

tags: philosophy
5 people liked it

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."
— T.S. Eliot

tags: life, poetry
76 people liked it

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
— T.S. Eliot

tags: poetry
69 people liked it

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
— T.S. Eliot

tags:
26 people liked it

"We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."
— T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party)

14 people liked it

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value
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