nick riso > nick's Quotes

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”
― Albert Einstein

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard love talked about.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller