Camilo > Camilo's Quotes

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: 'Yes, this is true, this is good.' This . . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don't forgive anything, because there is no longer anything to forgive. You don't really love — oh, what is here is higher than love! What's most frightening is that it's so terribly clear, and there's such joy. If it were longer than five seconds — the soul couldn't endure it and would vanish. In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, because it's worth it. To endure ten seconds one would have to change physically . . . .”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“God is necessary, and therefore must exist... But I know that he does not and cannot exist... Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
― Georges Bataille, Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you. Not Today. Good morning! But please come to tea -any time you like! Why not tomorrow? Good bye!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“They were frightfully angry. Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Never laugh at live dragons.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille

“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath