Mark > Mark's Quotes

“We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench...”
― Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

“What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau

“In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
― Elwood P. Dowd

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.”
― Horace

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Supposing is good, finding out is better.”
― Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

“I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”
― Charles Darwin

“Knowledge, as opposed to fantasies of wish fulfilment, is difficult to come by.”
― Bertrand Russell

“If things were simple, word would have gotten around.”
― Jacques Derrida

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
― Blaise Pascal, De l'art de persuader

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I'll be riding rough horses when you are salted away in a box.”
― Elmer Kelton, The Time It Never Rained

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”
― Tennessee Williams

“We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know.”
― W.H. Auden

“Maker sure you're right, then go ahead.”
― David Crockett

“There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]”
― Jean Cocteau

“Sing 'Hey to you — good-day to you' —
Sing 'Bah to you — ha! ha! to you' —
Sing 'Booh to you — pooh, pooh to you' —
And that's what you should say!”
― W.S. Gilbert, Patience

“Alec, what do you believe in? Don't laugh-tell me.' She waited and at last he said:
'I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don't believe it's driven by Father Christmas.”
― John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

“Don't take life TOO serious you can't get out alive anyhow.”
― Hank Williams

“There ain’t nobody I’d rather have alongside me in a bar brawl than my mama with a broken beer bottle in her hand.”
― Hank Williams

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.”
― Horace, Satires I

“Mutato nomine de te fabula narrator. Change but the name and the tale is told of you.”
― Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Blood & Sugar