Chris > Chris's Quotes

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
― Herman Melville

“Questions can be more dangerous than swords.”
― Evangeline Walton, Prince of Annwn

“There's nothing more frightening than a half-baked do-gooder who knows nothing of the world but takes it upon himself to tell the world what's good for it.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

“It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”
― Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

“Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.”
― Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

“What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

“Even a stone has its uses, and man who is the most intelligent of all creatures must be of some use, hasn't he?”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“How many crooked, out-of-the-way, narrow, impassable, and devious paths has humanity chosen in the attempt to attain eternal truth, while before it the straight road lay open...It is wider and more open and resplendent than all other paths, lying as it does in the full glare of the sun, and lit up by many lights in the night, but men have streamed past it in blind darkness. And how many times...have they still managed to swerve away from it and go astray, have managed in the broad light of day to get into the impassable out-of-the-way places again, have managed again to throw a blinding mist over each other's eyes, and running after will-o'-the-wisps have managed to reach the brink of the precipice only to ask themselves with horror: 'Where is the way out? Where is the road?' The present generation sees everything clearly, it is amazed and laughs at the folly of its ancestors...and self-confidently enters on a fresh set of errors at which their descendants will laugh again later on.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“Curiosity will conquer fear more than bravery will.”
― James Stephens

“My dog knows very little, but what little he does know he knows extraordinarily well.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Complete Adventures of Peter Pan

“Every tyranny in the world lives - and such systems have always lived - in a perpetual struggle against plain knowledge and illuminating discussion. (The Star-Begotten)”
― H. G. Wells

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“It wasn't that he had forgotten the lesson Takuan had taught him: the truly brave man is one who loves life, cherishing it as a treasure that once forfeited can never be recovered. He well knew that to live was more than merely to survive. The problem was how to imbue his life with meaning, how to ensure that his life would cast a bright ray of light into the future, even if it became necessary to give up that life for a cause. If he succeeded in doing this, the length of his life--twenty years or seventy--made little difference. A lifetime was only an insignificant interval in the endless flow of time.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Like most men with a vision, a plan, a program or a remedy, he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.”
― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“The point is, you are who you think you are – who you believe yourself into being. If you can’t think who you are, then you can only be what somebody else thinks you are. And who can you trust to think you right?”
― Kris Saknussemm

“Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!”
― William Godwin, Caleb Williams

“Life means whatever we most want to do: paint pictures, write books, make money, make love, make the world - or ourselves - a little better. Suffering perplexes us, because nobody wants to suffer.”
― R. O. Prowse