Shane > Shane's Quotes

“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“А жизнь идёт. Идёт потому, что есть надежда, без которой отчаяние убило бы жизнь.

And life goes on. It goes on because there is hope.”
― Gavriil Troyepolsky, Белый Бим Чёрное ухо

“I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.”
― James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener

“The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“Other things being roughly equal, that man lives most keenly who lives in closest harmony with nature. To be wholly alive a man must know storms, he must feel the ocean as his home or the air as his habitation. He must smell the things of earth, hear the sounds of living things and taste the rich abundance of the soil and sea.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“The South Pacific is memorable because when you are in the islands you simply cannot ignore nature. You cannot avoid looking up at the stars, large as apples on a new tree. You cannot deafen your ear to the thunder of the surf. The bright sands, the screaming birds, and the wild winds are always with you.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great good things of sound and sight and smell.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“The South Pacific was once the playground for ship-sick European sailors. Then it became the roistering barricade of the last great pirates. Next it was the longed-for escape from the canyons of New York. Then the unwilling theatre for an American military triumph. But now it has become the meeting ground for Asia and America.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America, and whether we with it or not, from now on there will be immense traffic along that highway.”
― James A. Michener, Return to Paradise

“At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.”
― James A. Michener, World Is My Home

“What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to reach America and its promise of an enriched life so I knew we had a country rich in opportunity, but I also met those brilliant Jews already in America who had been denied that promise.”
― James A. Michener, World Is My Home

“With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.”
― James A. Michener, World Is My Home

“Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which give rise to a large proportion of human error.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Speech is silver but silence is golden.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of historical and social ends.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connexion with the event itself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Love hinders death. Love is life. Anything at all that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is - everything exists - only because I love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Only by assuming an infinitesimally small unit for observation - a differential of history (that is, the common tendencies of men) - and arriving at the art of integration (finding the sum of the infinitesimals) can we hope to discover the laws of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“В России бывают и зимы, и весны. Вот она какая, наша Россия -- и зимы, и весны обязательно.

Russia has its winters and its springs. That's what our Russia is like -- it has winters and it has springs”
― Gavriil Troyepolsky, Белый Бим Чёрное ухо

“Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow-creatures.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot help knowing? Why use words when words cannot express what one feels?”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace