Anand > Anand's Quotes

“The finest of athletes have, along with skill, a few more essential qualities: to conduct their life with dignity, with integrity, with courage and modesty. All these, are totally compatible with pride, ambition, determination and competitiveness”
― Donald Bradman

“You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“لا أهدي هذا الكتاب إلى حبيبي الافتراضي ،
بل أهديه إلى الشجرة التي تم قصّها ،
ليصدر هذا الكتاب ؛
وأهديه ، مع اعتذاري ،
إلى الغابات في القارات عدّة ، التي تم قص أشجارٍ منها لتصدر كتبي إلى لغات أهلها ؛
وإلى الأشجار التي سيتم قصّها ما دمتُ على قيد الكتابة ...”
― غادة السمان, الحبيب الافتراضي

“شرط الرضا أن يستوى المنع و العطاء.”
― مصطفى محمود, رأيت الله

“As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place.

He chuckled rather heartily at my naiveté. 'I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while.'

And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?'

'Precisely,' he said, 'precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“الحبيب الجيد هو من يُغلف
ثقوب قلب حبيبته المجروح
ويُريح قلبها من المطاردات المتعبة
ورغم بُعده يطل بين نبض القلب ودمع العين
فيحاصرها لتبدأه فيه وتنتهى إليه”
― مِنه علي

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.

But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I only want power so I can get books.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" -- that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the "colossal vitality of his illusion". Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf