Dylan > Dylan's Quotes

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

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

“How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“I am the place in which something has occurred.”
― Claude Lévi-Strauss

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is”
― Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World

“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.”
― Leo Strauss

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“Absolute confidence or clarity is the privilege of fools and fanatics.”
― Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs