Keith > Keith's Quotes

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.”
― James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
― Thomas Merton , No Man Is an Island

“I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.”
― Albert Camus

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“irregularity of their income compounds the problem by ratcheting up the need to hold reserves, or to borrow when the income fails to arrive. For these reasons, we would argue that poor people need financial services more than any other group.”
― Daryl Collins, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day

“There are men who seem destined to always go first, to lead the way. They are confident in life, they are the first to go beyond it. Whatever there is to know, they learn before others. Their very existence gives strength and drives one onward. Love and jealousy were mingled there in the darkness, love and despair.”
― James Salter, Solo Faces: A Novel

“The classic decision is always the same, whether to retreat or go on. There comes a time when it is easier to continue upward, when the summit, in fact, is the only way out. At such a moment one must still have strength.”
― James Salter, Solo Faces: A Novel

“(clichés are truisms and all truisms are true)—On”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“suddenly felt frightened. He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“You don’t know what you’ve got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality …”
― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

“life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”
― Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

“It was so nice and uncomplicated. When I wasn’t sleeping I ran around and was excited. I never walked. I ran.”
― Erlend Loe, Naïve. Super

“The only question that really counts, must be this one: are things getting better or are they getting worse?”
― Erlend Loe, Naïve. Super

“That’s why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It’s a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“At the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper,” Marla says. "The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great. -- Maya Angelou”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness

“we carry thisx effort beyond a certain point, however, our manipulations interfere with the very course of nature, and this gets us into serious trouble indeed.”
― Alan W. Watts, What Is Tao?

“Those who speak, do not know; those who know, do not speak.”
― Alan W. Watts, What Is Tao?

“Maybe your lot right now could be improved. I know mine could. And working to make things better is great. But we don’t just work to make things better and leave it at that, do we? We live in the idealized world inside our heads. And that keeps us from ever really enjoying what we have right now, from enjoying the work that we’re doing to create our better tomorrow. It’s as if we’re afraid to really commit to this moment because a better one might come along later. This approach is totally ridiculous and completely absurd.*”
― Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality

“Buddhism, we say that life is like housekeeping in a dream. We may get a lot done, but in the end we wake up and what does it come to, all that effort?”
― Jamie Zeppa, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan