Nina > Nina's Quotes

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Иногда, по глазам угадав не высказанную еще мысль, они цитировали любимого Бродского: «Так долго вместе прожили, что вновь второе января пришлось на вторник…»”
― Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Medea and Her Children

“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch. For consumption by the masses, the political processes must be coloured like ginger-bread figures at a fair.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end.”
― Robert Fripp

“That's what people are like: they want talent, which is inherently peculiar, yet they absolutely don't want the peculiarities connected to it - perhaps necessarily bound up with it - which they refuse to understand or forgive.”
― Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

“Frequent reflection on this subject, moreover, inclines me to the belief that this reluctance to exchange the darkness of the womb for the light of day is connected to my extraordinary gift and passion for sleep.”
― Thomas Mann

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.”
― Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Stories

“hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling...”
― Herman Melville

“All murder'd-for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“History has never been a morality play about the inevitable victory of freedom and democracy. Instead, the world remains what it always was: an arena of struggle between idealism and power, good governance and corruption, the surge of freedom and the need to curb it in times of crisis and emergency.”
― Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Do you by chance have anything for snake venom?” a cool voice asked.”
― I.V. Ophelia, The Poisoner

“If you don't like my story,write your own”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.”
― Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.”
― Raylan Givens Justified

“When they say, ‘society is well designed,’ you should always ask yourself: for whom?”
― Ahmed Bouanani, L'hôpital

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“1. I believe in myself.
2. My self-talk will always be positive.
3. I will come to compete every day.
4. I will not surrender.
5. I will not turn against myself during tough times.
6. I cannot choose what is happening around me, but I can (and will) choose how I respond.
7. I will use setbacks as learning opportunities.
8. I will focus on my strengths and contain my weaknesses.
9. I understand that my role as a team member is to help my teammates win.
10. I will not come in second best to myself.
There's a choice you make in everything you do. And you must always keep in mind The choice you make makes you!”
― Bill Beswick, Focused for Soccer

“Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”
― Mike Tyson

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.”
― Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
― C. P. Scott

“When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations