Symone M. > Symone's Quotes

“We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
― HEGEL

“The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.”
― René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure

“The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

“To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.”
― Rene Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law - and finds no lawgiver.”
― René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

“One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.”
― Leo Strauss

“Nihilism is the rejection of the principles of civilisation as such . . . I said civilisation, and not: culture. For I have noticed that many nihilists are great lovers of culture, as distinguished from, and opposed to, civilisation. Besides, the term culture leaves it undetermined what the thing is which is to be cultivated (blood and soil or the mind), whereas the term civilisation designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian.”
― Leo Strauss

“Life is the joyless quest for joy.”
― Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History

“Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself. ...the most important consideration concerns that which transcends the city or which is higher than the city; it does not concern things which are simply subordinate to the city.”
― Leo Strauss, The City and Man

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.”
― David Bohm

“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”
― David Bohm

“Time is a game played beautifully by children.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Man's character is his fate.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Even what those with the greatest reputation for knowing it all claim to understand and defend are but opinions.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Words are mere sound and smoke, dimming the heavenly light.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“When scholars study a thing, they strive
To kill it first, if its alive;
Then they have the parts and they’ve lost the whole
For the link that’s missing was the living soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine.”
― Goethe

“Everybody wants to be somebody,but nobody wants to grow... ”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If you would create something,
you must be something.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”
― Plotinus

“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.”
― Plotinus