Michael > Michael's Quotes

“To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.”
― T. S. Eliot

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Es curioso cómo el pensamiento incurre en lo inverosímil, cómo se lo permite momentáneamente, cómo fantasea o se hace supersticioso para descansar un rato o encontrar alivio, cómo es capaz de negar los hechos y hacer que retroceda el tiempo, aunque sea un instante. Cómo se parece al sueño.”
― Javier Marías

“The wolf is living for the earth.”
― Ted Hughes

“What happened casually remains -”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.”
― Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valery

“We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“Under the bludgeonings of fate
My head is bloody, but unbowed.”
― Adolfo Bioy Casares, Diario de la guerra del cerdo