Jake > Jake's Quotes

“I come in peace...Take me to your lizard.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagina-tion—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why ? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it ? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
― Confucious

“Very like leaves upon this earth are the generations of men—old leaves, cast on the ground by wind, young leaves the greening forest bears when spring comes in. So mortals pass; one generation flowers even as another dies away.”
― Homer

“It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Self love is like that instrument by which we propagate the species: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it must be hidden.”
― Voltaire

“Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.”
― H.L. Mencken

“When flowing water...meets with obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses. It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it...

Do not turn and run, for there is nowhere worthwhile for you to go. Do not attempt to push ahead into the danger... emulate the example of the water: Pause and build up your strength until the obstacle no longer represents a blockage.”
― Thomas F. Cleary, I Ching: The Book of Change

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

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

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I sleep among ravishing illusions and wake to their burden.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1930

“One day you discover you are alive.
Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight!
You laugh, you dance around, you shout.
But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”
― Aristotle, Politics

“Toxic people attach themselves like cinder blocks tied to your ankles, and then invite you for a swim in their poisoned waters.”
― John Mark Green

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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

“not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times