Patty E > Patty's Quotes

“The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. ”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

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

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”
― Banksy

“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , The Second Sex

“Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“The category of Other is as original as consciousness itself. The duality between Self and Other can be found in the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies; the division did not always fall into the category of the division of the sexes (...) No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself. It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travellers to become vaguely hostile 'others'. Village people view anyone not belonging to the village as suspicious 'others'. For the native of a country, inhabitants of other countries are viewed as 'foreigners'; Jews are the 'others' for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous people for colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex