Derek Sutter > Derek's Quotes

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
― Albert Einstein

“I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
"After all this time?"
"Always," said Snape.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
― Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
― Pindar

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
― Albert Camus

“Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club