Sam > Sam's Quotes

“As things are, there is about wisdom a nobility and magnificence in the fact that she didn't just fall to a person's lot, that each man owes her to his own efforts, that one doesn't go to anyone other than oneself to find her.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic: Complete (Letters 1 - 124) Adapted for the Contemporary Reader

“Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that can not fly.

Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“My music is evidence of my soul's will to live.”
― Charles Mingus

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“That which is possible is inevitable.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“It smells terrible in here.'

Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

[Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]”
― Louis D. Brandeis

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
― Emily Dickinson

“The race of men, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.”
― Carl Van Doren

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste it's fragrance on the desert air.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
― Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

“The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan

“What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation”
― Graham Greene

“Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora