Atli Ársælsson > Atli's Quotes

“Peace if possible. Truth at all costs.”
― Martin Luther

“It is absurd to pretend that one cannot love the same woman always, as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to execute a piece of music.”
― Honore de Balzac

“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.”
― Socrates

“Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“True love is eternal, infinite and always like itself. It's always equal and pure. Without violent demonstrations: It is seen with white hairs and is always young at heart.”
― Honore de Balzac

“There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.”
― Martin Luther

“No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre–preferably to Iceland. Good morning.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.”
― Martin Luther

“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
― Honore de Balzac

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.”
― Martin Luther

“I am not deep, but I am very wide.”
― Balzac

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Reading brings us unknown friends”
― Honore de Balzac

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage: Ou Meditations De Philosophie Eclectique, Sur Le Bonheur Et Le Malheur Conjugal

“To love all ages yield surrender;
But to the young it's raptures bring
A blessing bountiful and tender-
As storms refresh the fields of spring.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“I am a galley slave to pen and ink.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Habit is heaven's gift to us:
a substitute for happiness.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“Days when I came to flower serenely
in Lycée gardens long ago,
and read my Apuleius keenly,
but spared no glance for Cicero.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy