Tracy > Tracy's Quotes

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
― Lao Tzu

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”
― Confucius

“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”
― Anatole France

“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.”
― Tracy Kidder, Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

“Half of these aren't even Machiavelli.
Some are Plato, Thucydides etc....doesnt anyone check these?”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“He who builds on the people, builds on the mud”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything...”
― Robert G. Ingersoll

“among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.”
― Tracy Kidder

“The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“I don’t have to tell you, “I don’t have to tell you” before telling you something I don’t have to tell you. I also don't have to tell you I love you, but I do.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“All serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.”
― Harold Howe