Mike > Mike's Quotes

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.”
― Joseph Campbell

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“I do not understand exactly what you mean by fear," said Tarzan. "Like lions, fear is a different thing in different men, but to me the only pleasure in the hunt is the knowledge that the hunted thing has power to harm me as much as I have to harm him. If I went out with a couple of rifles and a gun bearer, and twenty or thirty beaters, to hunt a lion, I should not feel that the lion had much chance, and so the pleasure of the hunt would be lessened in proportion to the increased safety which I felt."

"Then I am to take it that Monsieur Tarzan would prefer to go naked into the jungle, armed only with a jackknife, to kill the king of beasts," laughed the other good naturedly, but with the merest touch of sarcasm in his tone.

"And a piece of rope," added Tarzan.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes

“We are, all of us, creatures of habit, and when the seeeming necessity for schooling ourselves in new ways ceases to exist, we fall naturally and easily into the manner and customs which long usage has implanted ineradicably within us.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Beasts of Tarzan

“As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes

“There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Mountain of Light

“It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.”
― Nick Hornby

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I can see he's not in your good books,' said the messenger.
'No, and if he were I would burn my library.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“What's past is prologue.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”
― George R.R. Martin

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain