Harold > Harold's Quotes

“On Ira Gershwin:
I remember when he was given the manuscript of a novel written by a woman friend who had hopes of having it published. To his astonishment it turned out to be the dirtiest, most pornographic book he had ever read. When the lady mentioned that she intended to use a nom de plume, Ira suggested she call herself Henrietta Miller.”
― Oscar Levant, The Unimportance of Being Oscar

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
― Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz__that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.”
― Keith Richards, Life

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody come sit next to me.”
― Alice Roosevelt Longworth

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.”
― James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce

“Forgive me. I continue to underestimate the breadth of your ignorance.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
― Stephen King

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
― Groucho Marx

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
― Mark Twain