Stephen > Stephen's Quotes

“Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.”
― G. I. Gurdjieff

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”
― Stephen King

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“We feel the weight of the world but not the wonder, and in time we resign ourselves to one but forget the other.
Once in a while, we remember.
Once in a while, something happens...and we see the cracks in our convictions, and through them a sliver of that larger, wider world outside the one we have constructed.”
― Nate Staniforth, Here Is Real Magic: A Magician's Search for Wonder in the Modern World

“I think you grow up twice, The first time happens automatically. Everyone passes from childhood to adulthood, and this transition is marked as much by the moment when the weight of the world overshadows the wonder of the world as it is by the passage of years. Usually you don't get to choose when it happens. But if the triumph of this weight over wonder makes the first passage into adulthood, the second is the rediscovery of that wonder despite sickness, evil, fear, sadness, suffering-despite everything. And this second passage doesn't happen on its own. It's a choice, not an inevitability. It is something you have to deliberately find, and value, and protect.And you can't just do it once and keep it forever. You have to keep looking.”
― Nate Staniforth, Here Is Real Magic: A Magician's Search for Wonder in the Modern World

“Who are you then?"
"I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.”
― Colin Wilson