Pri > Pri's Quotes

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
― Norman Cousins

“Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.”
― W. Edwards Deming

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“But don’t think that it’s a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It’s our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it’s cold outside. But it’s not the cold’s fault that it’s cold.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; Fools, because they have to say something.”
― Plato

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
― Mark Twain

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”
― Eugene T. Gendlin, Focusing

“Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia