Sanja Halmetoja > Sanja's Quotes

“[...]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

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“What's done cannot be undone.”
― William Shakespeare , Macbeth

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Niin. Riihen taka ne aina häviää... Riihen taka meiltä hävitään kun lähdetään... Kapinaan taikka sotaan, ammuttavaksi taikka työhön... Mihinkä kullonkin mennään...”
― Väinö Linna, Täällä Pohjantähden alla 1–3

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…”
― Hermes Trismegistus

“If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.
Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.

But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius

“Close your eyes and let the mind expand. Let no fear of death or darkness arrest its course. Allow the mind to merge with Mind. Let it flow out upon the great curve of consciousness. Let it soar on the wings of the great bird of duration, up to the very Circle of Eternity.”
― Hermes

“The punishment of desire is the agony of unfulfillment”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Poimandres

“Birth is not the beginning of life - only of an individual awareness. Change into another state is not death - only the ending of this awareness.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum