Aims > Aims's Quotes

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will have memories
Because of what we did back then
When we were new at this,

Yes, we did many things, then - all
Beautiful...”
― Sappho, Come Close

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“They do the work, and he gets all the money. They think he’s a crook, and he thinks they’re fools. You can’t blame either side; they’re both right.”
― John Williams, Butcher's Crossing

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche