Eric's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 68)

"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

tags: california, society
21 people liked it

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

53 people liked it

"Isn't it pretty to think so."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

72 people liked it

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

47 people liked it

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: drinking
717 people liked it

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: insanity, society
168 people liked it

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: corruption, dark, fighting, monsters, side, soul
387 people liked it

"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

51 people liked it

"I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

7 people liked it

"Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

19 people liked it

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."
— Plato

tags: compassion, kindness
991 people liked it

"There is truth in wine and children"
— Plato (Symposium and Phaedrus)

58 people liked it

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."
— Plato

155 people liked it

"There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain."
— Plato

22 people liked it

"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them."
— Plato (Plato's Republic)

tags: law, music, state
25 people liked it

"Music gives soul to the universe
wings to the mind
flight to the imagination
and life to everything"
— Plato

128 people liked it

"Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness."
— David Hume

13 people liked it

"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."
— David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature)

tags: philosophy
40 people liked it

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."
— Gustave Flaubert

tags: inspirational, life, work
56 people liked it

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."
— Gustave Flaubert

21 people liked it

"We live as we dream--alone...."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

tags: dream, loneliness
78 people liked it

"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

tags: work
26 people liked it

"There is no perfection only life"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

45 people liked it

"I have no mission. No one has."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

29 people liked it

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
— Bertrand Russell

tags: happiness, love
365 people liked it

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell

125 people liked it

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. "
— Bertrand Russell

tags: beliefs, philosophy, skepticism
55 people liked it

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
— Bertrand Russell

37 people liked it

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."
— Bertrand Russell

23 people liked it

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
— Bertrand Russell

38 people liked it

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
— Bertrand Russell

69 people liked it

"War doesn’t decide who is right, war decides who is left."
— Bertrand Russell

49 people liked it

"Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality."
— Bertrand Russell

8 people liked it

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
— Bertrand Russell

28 people liked it

"If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."
— Émile Zola

tags: art, calling, life
69 people liked it

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
— Victor Hugo

tags: literature, music, poetry
632 people liked it

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
— Søren Kierkegaard

tags: civil-rights, free-speech, free-will, freedom, intelligence, liberty, stupidity
142 people liked it

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard

tags: future, life, past, reflection, understanding
155 people liked it

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus

tags: civilization, writers, writing
154 people liked it

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

tags: romance
155 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
864 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
52 people liked it

"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
— Albert Camus

tags: idleness, inaction, mediocrity
59 people liked it

"Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason."
— Albert Camus

10 people liked it

"Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money."
— Martin Amis (Money)

3 people liked it

"Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls."
— Martin Amis (Money: A Suicide Note)

11 people liked it

"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit."
— Martin Amis (London Fields)

tags: age, aging, life, time
17 people liked it