Gregory > Gregory's Quotes

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
― Lao Tse

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

“Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“The notion of "the Bible as literature," though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of "Dante as literature," given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or "religious," than most of the Bible.)”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”
― Andy Bernard

“There is an old tradition that after the battle of Hastings William the Conqueror marched toward Dover, whereon Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Egelsine, the Abbot of St. Augustine's, assembled the people of Kent in arms at Swanscombe. Every man had a green bough in his hand, and when William approached he thought he saw a forest on the march. Then the people cast down the boughs, and sent a messenger to the Conqueror offering him peace if he would guarantee their ancient liberties, or "war, and that most deadly, if thou deny it them". Probably this legend is the earliest source of the incident of Birnam Wood in Shakespeare's Macbeth.”
― Henry Bett

“There have been so many interpretations of the story that I'm not going to choose between them. Make your own choice. They contradict each other, the various choices. The only choice that really matters, the only interpretation of the story, if you want one, is your own. Not your teacher's, not your professor's, not mine, not a critic's, not some authority's. The only thing that matters is, first, the experience of being in the story, moving through it. Then any interpretation you like. If it's yours, then that's the right one, because what's in a book is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”
― Soren Kierkegaard