Judith Johnson > Judith's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“Money has no religion except itself.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

“To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed.”
― Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey through Trees

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.”
― Margaret Wise Brown

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
― Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
― Clive James

“If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.”
― Rita Dove

“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive — it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables + Anne of Avonlea + Anne of the Island (Annotated): Enriched Edition. The 3 First Anne Shirley Classics Unabridged

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about 'target-rich environments' and 'collateral damage' - that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing - and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, 'them' and 'us', victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents a total failure of the human spirit.”
― Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

“In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.”
― Taner Akçam

“The inner, what is it: if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”
― Buddha

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”
― George Saunders, Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness