J > J's Quotes

“No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.”
― Christian Nestell Bovee

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth.”
― Ludwig Borne

“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”
― Lao Tzu

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.”
― Dorothy Dix

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“Beware the fury of a patient man”
― Tom Clancy

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
― Robert J. Hanlon

“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.”
― Aleksander Pushkin

“Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“..depression still kept guard on him, and chased after him like a shadow - or like a faithful wife.”
― Alexander Pushkin , Eugene Onegin

“There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics…Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble…Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation…Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent…Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, therefore cats bark…Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason…A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“I feel like the word shatter.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
― William Blake

“Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary