Vili > Vili's Quotes

“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her.”
― Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization

“As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.”
― Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Corporal Nobbs,” he rasped, “why are you kicking people when they’re down?” “Safest way, sir,” said Nobby. Nobby had long ago been told about fighting fair and not striking a fallen opponent, and had then given some creative thought to how these rules applied to someone four feet tall with the muscle tone of an elastic band.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Nobby had survived any number of famous massacres by not being there.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“For pride and avarice and envy are the three fierce sparks that set all hearts ablaze.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“He tried to hate God but he doesn’t believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.

Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“Tomorrow came, and it was much like yesterday. Just more so.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Trouble With Peace

“I put Algernon's body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard. I cried.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Gilgamesh was called a god and a man; Enkidu was an animal and a man. It is the story of their becoming human together.”
― Herbert Mason, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand or pity him”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

“It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

“To state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus