Eric > Eric's Quotes

“Without injustices,
the name of justice
would mean what?”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Every time I stole a dollar I knew I was breaking a law and working a hardship on the loser. Yet for years I kept on doing it. I wonder how many of us quit wronging others for the best reason of all — because it is wrong, and we know it.”
― Jack Black, You Can't Win

“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“The earth underfoot squelched. The clay was impassable. You can't travel in a sleigh or a cart, but the Murzas still want to ride, don't they? They'd not be caught walking on foot — it doesn't suit their rank. You see the Degenerators kneading the clay mud with their felt boots, hauling the sleighs; they pull with all their might, cussing up a storm, but the sleighs won't budge. The Murza lashes them: Pull! They curse him. Such a hullabaloo. In short: spring!”
― Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx

“Perhaps it is a very good thing that we cannot wholly rule our minds and that they force on us ideas and images which we would ignobly prefer to dismiss; thus truth makes its way in spite of egotism and unconsciousness.”
― Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev

“Nothing could be avoided, and nothing could be foreseen. What was the point of unnecessary fear?”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“It’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest—one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all—the big things come and go with wi’ no striving o’ our’n.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical . . . If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Sur

“He swore to all the world and to himself that he would remain decent. And as long as he had money, he remained decent. But then he ran out of money, which was a moment he had been waiting for, to show them all what he was made of.”
― Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

“Few men think; yet all have opinions. ”
― George Berkeley

“So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made…
For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“The best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it's best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what's inside simply won't stand up to scrutiny.”
― Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“The lack of understanding produced a lack of belief. And the lack of belief meant death. Very, very dangerous. The Mentor had told him bluntly: the essential thing was to believe in the idea to the very end, unconditionally. To realize that not understanding anything was an absolutely indispensable condition of the Experiment.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“So all right, then, he thought bitterly, it means I'm a poor soldier. Or rather, I'm just a soldier. And no more than a soldier. That selfsame soldier who doesn't know how to reflect on things, so he has to obey blindly. And I'm not any kind of chess partner or ally of the Great Strategist, but just a tiny little cog in his colossal machine, and my place is not at the table in his inscrutable game but beside Wang, with Uncle Yura, with Selma . . .”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.”
― Robert Heinlein