N > N's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Things that seemed unrelated at first comes together to form one, and unimportant moments all feel like destiny.”
― Nidhi Manikoth

“Pay attention to the intricate patterns of your existence that you take for granted.”
― Doug Dillon

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“When you are not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives.”
― Lauren Eden, Lioness Awakens

“If you work really hard, and you're kind, amazing things will happen.”
― Conan O'Brien

“By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert... I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old...”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Everyone likes to reminisce, but no one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Evans: We don't know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Everyone is afraid of something. The enemy must be, too. The more powerful they are, the more they have to lose to their fears.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Every day on this planet some species that doesn't draw the attention of humans goes extinct.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end. On”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment’s notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-class submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong. As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, antimatter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless. *”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Let’s go drinking and then go back to sleep like good bugs.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem