NormaCenva > NormaCenva's Quotes

“Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.”
― Derren Brown, Confessions of a Conjuror

“There is a common response from people when they hear that in the absence of evidence to convince me otherwise I don’t have any particular belief in ghosts, psychic powers or an afterlife. It normally runs something along the lines of ‘So you think we just live, die and that’s it? Come on...’ There’s a clear implication there that this earthly life – the wonder of being human – is somehow worthless. That it’s cheap and disappointing enough to warrant that ‘just’ and the accompanying incredulous tone, which are usually reserved for sentences like ‘After all that it was just a little spider? Come on...’ I live, I am sure, in a fairly narrow band of life, and make an embarrassingly pitiful attempt to explore the world I find myself upon. I ache with guilt and conflict when I hear of people living as adventurers, abandoning mainstream lives and living each day with abandon. But I really hope I have a brighter vision for this life and a greater curiosity for its richness than one who can say, and mean, ‘You think we just live, die and that’s it?”
― Derren Brown, Confessions of a Conjuror

“We see the illusion of individual predilection being maintained, for example, in the array of different styles of iPhone cases available to us. We wonder which of the provided range of colourful or sophisticated sheaths best communicates to the world our unique character. Thus we lean towards the wood effect, or the Batman one (ironically sported, of course), or the vintage Union Jack. Meanwhile, it is much harder to honestly ask ourselves whether our lives would be improved were we not to be attached to our devices quite as umbilically, and how much misery they bring us alongside the various conveniences and amusements. Whether we might be more authentically ourselves if, with a pioneering and curious spirit, we occasionally left them at home. It”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”
― Louis Adamic

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

“Don't get it right, get it written.”
― James Thurber

“I’m pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife, but he had to believe that there is an immortality in living so that your words and actions transform the world around you in ways that will continue to reverberate forever. No one with so much life in him can ever truly die.”
― Daniel Radosh

“Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
― Milton Friedman

“What I am is a proud humanist. Atheism says what I don't accept, humanism says what I do." - Nathan Phelps”
― Nathan Phelps

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion”
― Steven Weinberg

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road.”
― Suzan-Lori Parks

“I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
― Ray Bradbury

“For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

“For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.”
― LeVar Burton

“We have eternity, beloved."
"You may have eternity. I have only now."
"But this is eternity.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in. —Robert Seidenberg”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tryant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.”
― Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.”
― Jincy Willett, The Writing Class

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter