Ross > Ross's Quotes

“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Death will be late to bring us aid”
― William Carlos Williams

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

“Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"

Not what he pleases, but what he can.”
― George MacDonald, The Complete Fairy Tales

“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”
― Bill Watterson

“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.”
― Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
― Niels Bohr

“Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”
― Paul Auster

“He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“The world more often rewards outward signs of merit than merit itself.”
― La Rochefoucaul

“A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita