Sam Torode > Sam's Quotes

“As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”
― Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”
― P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“But what is the love life of newts, if you boil it right down? Didn't you tell me once that they just waggled their tails at one another in the mating season?'
'Quite correct.'
I shrugged my shoulders. 'Well all right, if they like it. But it's not my idea of molten passion.”
― P. G. Wodehouse

“The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mr. Mulliner Speaking

“Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns.”
― P. G. Wodehouse

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”
― Epictetus

“Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.”
― Alan Watts

“Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Like art, love is an act of creation, but love far surpasses art as a cure for emotional suffering.”
― George E. Valliant

“It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination.”
― Thornton Wilder, Theophilus North

“The past and the future are always present within us.”
― Thornton Wilder, Theophilus North

“Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them.”
― Thornton Wilder

“For years Belpher oysters had been the mainstay of gay supper parties at the Savoy, the Carlton and Romano's. Dukes doted on them; chorus girls wept if they were not on the bill of fare. And then, in an evil hour, somebody discovered that what made the Belpher oyster so particularly plump and succulent was the fact that it breakfasted, launched and dined almost entirely on the local sewage. There is but a thin line ever between popular homage and execration.”
― P. G. Wodehouse