Elliot Chalom > Elliot's Quotes

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be”
― Abraham Maslow

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
― Oscar Wilde

“One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“Happiness is fine, in its season, but happiness out of season is a sure harbinger of doom.”
― Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it.”
― Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr

“It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”
― Tom Perrotta, Little Children

“I would hate to die for a lot of reasons. But mostly because of all the books I haven't yet read.”
― Peg Lynch

“If history proves two things, one is that the avant-garde almost always gets assimilated, and two, young people get older.”
― Bob Zmuda

“If you can't offend people in a free society, then the question you have to ask yourself is, "Just how free is it?”
― Bob Zmuda, Andy Kaufman: The Truth, Finally

“Eroticize intelligence.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“As a general thing anyone who is not your friend will advise neutrality while anyone who is your friend will ask you to join him, weapon in hand.”
― Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Let that be as it will, thus much is certain, that, however spiritual intrigues begin, they generally conclude like all others; they may branch upward toward heaven, but the root is in the earth.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin

“You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.”
― Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”
― Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

“There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. If impetus in this direction is weakened instead of being intensified, something much more than mere lack of preparation takes place. The pupil is actually robbed of native capacities which otherwise would enable him [sic] to cope with the circumstances that he meets in the course of his life. We often see persons who have had little schooling and in whose case the absence of set schooling proves to be a positive asset. They have at least retained their native common sense and power of judgement, and its exercise in the actual conditions of living has given them the precious gift of ability to learn from the experiences they have.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“الصمت يجذب الانتباه. وقد يكون مثيراً. يجعلك غامضاً أو مشبوهاً.”
― Milan Kundera, La festa dell'insignificanza

“Do what makes you happy, be with who makes you smile, laugh as much as you breathe, and love as long as you live.”
― Rachel Ann Nunes

“Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Pain is surprising; we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love... why we are unable to sleep at night.... Identifying reasons for such discomforts does not spectacularly absolve us of pain, but it may form the principal basis of a recovery. While assuring us that we are not uniquely cursed, understanding grants us a sense of the boundaries to, and bitter logic behind, our suffering. 'Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.' - Proust”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life