Autodidact > Autodidact's Quotes

“The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it's something that starts in people's heads. So when these clowns start shouting "Stop the ruin!" - I laugh!' 'I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards - which is his real job - all this "ruin" will automatically disappear”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Words do not express thoughts very well. they always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”
― Nikola Tesla

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Nikola Tesla

“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers!" "I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Love is a serious mental disease.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“I think; therefore I am.”
― Rene Descartes

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
― René Descartes

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“Scientia potentia est.

Knowledge is power.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu: With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss

“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”
― Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity

“The mental features discoursed of as the
analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate
them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are
always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest
enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such
exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral
activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial
occupations bringing his talents into play. He is fond of enigmas, of
conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of
acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results,
brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole
air of intuition.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

“Devlet adamı olarak hiçbir zaman aklımızdan çıkaramayız ki, hilafet orduları bu ülkeyi baştan başa harabeye çevirmişlerdir. Hilafet orduları kurulması olasılığını hiçbir zaman gözden uzak tutmayacağız... Türk ulusu en acıklı sıkıntılarını halife ordusundan çekmiştir. Bir daha çekmeyecektir."
"Bir hilafet fetvasının Dünya Savaşı belasına bizi attığını hiçbir zaman unutmayacağız. Bir hilafet fetvasının, ulus ayağa kalkmak istediği zaman, ona düşmanlardan daha kötü bir şekilde saldırdığını unutmayacağız."
"Tarihin herhangi bir döneminde, bir halife, aklından bu ülkenin mukadderatına karışmak isteğini geçirirse, o kafayı mutlaka koparacağız!”
― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nutuk

“At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs— as long as no one is watching, anything goes.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing