Stephen > Stephen's Quotes

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of the land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.”
― Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack: A Novel

“Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.”
― Jim Harrison

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.”
― Matthew Arnold, The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

“Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly. It is impossible to put the pieces together if you do not have in your head the idea of the whole. What is the use of providing yourself with paints if you do not know what to paint? No man sketches out a definite plan for his life; we only determine bits of it. The bowman must first know what he is aiming at: then he has to prepare hand, bow, bowstring, arrow and his drill to that end. Our projects go astray because they are not addressed to a target.16 No wind is right for a seaman who has no predetermined harbour.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.”
― Rumi

“It is written in my life-blood, such that it is, thick or thin; and I can no other.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Our very life depends on everything’s
Recurring till we answer from within.
The thousandth time may prove the charm.”
― Frost Robert

“There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal guy like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be where you get to the other place.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
― Hermann Hesse , Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Charles Baudelaire: Get Drunk
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: 'It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!'
-- Charles Baudelaire, tr. Michael Hamburger”
― Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems

“Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.

And if sometimes,
on the stairs of a palace,
or on the green side of a ditch,
or in the dreary solitude of your own room,
you should awaken
and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you,
ask of the wind,
or of the wave,
or of the star,
or of the bird,
or of the clock,
of whatever flies,
or sighs,
or rocks,
or sings,
or speaks,
ask what hour it is;
and the wind,
wave,
star,
bird,
clock will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”
― Carl Jung

“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

“Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It meant that Crowley had been allowed to develop Manchester, while Aziraphale had a free hand in the whole of Shropshire. Crowley took Glasgow, Aziraphale had Edinburgh (neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes,* but both reported it as a success).”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Come to the edge," he said.
"We can't, we're afraid!" they responded.
"Come to the edge," he said.
"We can't, We will fall!" they responded.
"Come to the edge," he said.
And so they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“To lead good, happy lives, we need to be able to focus on the book most important to us now. This means to stop reading some and never to start reading others. When we dwell only in possibility, we get nowhere. Doing what has intrinsic value to us helps us decide which books are right for us. It gives us a clear selection compass for which direction we should go in and which we should avoid.”
― Chris Masi, Stop Chasing Carrots: Healing Self-Help Deceptions With a Scientific Philosophy Of Life

“Research shows that the pursuit of material wealth and achievements fails to create true happiness and that happiness depends four times as much on why we do things than on what these things bring our way. While”
― Chris Masi, Stop Chasing Carrots: Healing Self-Help Deceptions With a Scientific Philosophy Of Life

“Our daily happiness depends at least four times as much on how we approach life than on what life brings our way.” Mark Leary”
― Chris Masi, Stop Chasing Carrots: Healing Self-Help Deceptions With a Scientific Philosophy Of Life