Vanessa's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 130)

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism
4,888 people liked it

"Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows."
— Cioran

tags: life
3 people liked it

"There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."
— Woody Allen (Annie Hall)

tags: humour, life
22 people liked it

"To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness."
— Émile Michel Cioran

tags: motivational_for_the_unmotivated, philosophy
4 people liked it

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus

tags: coffee, sucide
162 people liked it

"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
— Albert Camus (L'etranger)

37 people liked it

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

"I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

tags: philosophic, philosophy
125 people liked it

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
— Albert Camus

tags: existentialism, greek, happiness, mythology, perspective, philosophy, purpose, sisyphus
50 people liked it

"You only die once, and it's for such a long time"
— Molière

2 people liked it

"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: humor, philosophy
819 people liked it

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: amorality, correct-way, individuality, my-way, only-way, right-way, the-way, your-way
402 people liked it

"I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: philosophy
241 people liked it

"Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."
— Émile Michel Cioran

tags: life
4 people liked it

"It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us."
— Émile Michel Cioran (The Trouble With Being Born)

tags: philosophers
2 people liked it

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus

tags: happiness, meaning-of-life
790 people liked it

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
— Albert Camus

tags: intellectuals, intelligence, philosophy, scholars
129 people liked it

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."
— Albert Camus

tags: art, inspiration, life
56 people liked it

"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
— Albert Camus

tags: atheism, god, religion
61 people liked it

"Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."
— Albert Camus

33 people liked it

"Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue."
— Molière

2 people liked it

"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
— Edmond De Goncourt

tags: art
14 people liked it

"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."
— Edmond De Goncourt

tags: atheism, religion
31 people liked it

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers"
— Voltaire

108 people liked it

"God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh."
— Voltaire

74 people liked it

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
— Voltaire

39 people liked it

"Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous."
— Voltaire

33 people liked it

""You're a bitter man," said Candide.
"That's because I've lived," said Martin."
— Voltaire (Candide)

11 people liked it

"Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like."
— Émile Zola (Germinal)

6 people liked it

"For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

25 people liked it

"you walk on corpses, Beauty, undismayed,"
— Charles Baudelaire

7 people liked it

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."
— Charles Baudelaire (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays)

tags: creativity, process
6 people liked it

"Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned."
— Charles Baudelaire

4 people liked it

"There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen

120 people liked it

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
— Leonard Cohen

24 people liked it

"As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. "
— Leonard Cohen (The Favorite Game)

25 people liked it

"I have often prayed for you
like this
Let me have her"
— Leonard Cohen

10 people liked it

"I have tried in my way to be free."
— Leonard Cohen

6 people liked it

"Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached."
— Leonard Cohen (The Favorite Game)

6 people liked it

"Silence

And a deeper silence

When the crickets

Hesitate"
— Leonard Cohen

4 people liked it

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
— Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau)

tags: life
159 people liked it

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings)

tags: simplicity
117 people liked it

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

50 people liked it

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, quotation, wit
575 people liked it

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: dreaming, dreams, imagination
537 people liked it

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: power, sex
523 people liked it

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

tags: mothers, women
538 people liked it

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: education, knowledge
431 people liked it

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

tags: life, surrealistic
389 people liked it