Simon > Simon's Quotes

“He took her in in his arms and kissed her. The coffeepot boiled over and they laughed and laughed with the simple foolish joy of being alive.”
― Morris L. West, Daughter of Silence

“But did thee feel the earth move?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
― Edgar Mitchell

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
― Bertrand Russell

“where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.”
― ernest hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

“A good meal, a good talk, a good fuck--what better way to pass the day?”
― Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

“A woman is a cathedral, boys. Worship one at every chance you get.”
― Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society

“And what would you do with yourself to pass the time away?" I once asked. "What would I do?" she repeated in astonishment. "I would do nothing. I would just live."
What an idea! What a sane idea! I envied her phlegm, her indolence, her insouciance. I would urge her to talk about it at length, about doing nothing, I mean. It was an ideal I had never flirted with. To accomplish it one must have an empty mind, or else a full rich one. It would be better, I used to think, to have an empty mind.”
― Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

“This is a hell of dull talk... How about some of that champagne?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“No; that doesn't interest me.'
'That's because you never read a book about it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“He's so damned nice and he's so awful. He's my sort of thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“don't ask me a lot of questions if you don't like the answers”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk.”
― Hemingway Ernest, The Sun Also Rises

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human.”
― Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

“The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practised on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practised dreamer slips into like a bone slips into its sockets”
― Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Ze heeft me uitgelegd dat je niet moet zeggen 'met elkaar naar bed gaan', maar 'met 'met elkaar intiem zijn'... En dit zijn we nu geweest, o mijn god! En ik zal het voortaan altijd zo noemen, geloof me, schat.”
― Willem Frederik Hermans, In de mist van het schimmenrijk: Fragmenten uit het oorlogsdagboek van de student Karel R.

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
― Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason