Rohan > Rohan 's Quotes

“One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?

( Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him. ) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. ( Pause. ) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. ( He listens. ) But habit is a great deadener. ( He looks again at Estragon. ) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. ( Pause. ) I can't go on! ( Pause. ) What have I said?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I have often felt that I am being watched. That my life is being witnessed by unseen forces, that adjustments are made as these forces see fit, to thwart me, to humiliate me.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

“Is it a metaphorical accident that the cranium will fuse in months to come, thus ensuing the illustrated close-mindedness, the inevitable, tragic separation of I from the World? The ego always wins, of course. And at what price?”
― Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

“The bourgeois belly merely belched from satiety and that of the proletarian cried out from too much hunger.”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“Because even the beggars of the spirit — those who always remain outside to warm up while the more noble part of humanity enters into the hell of life — these humble and devoted servants of their tyrant, these unconscious slanderers of superior minds, even these, we say, did not want to depart.

They did not want to die.

They writhed, they wept, they implored, they prayed!

But all this from a low instinct of impotent and bestial self-preservation, deprived of every heroic roar of revolt, and not instead from questions of a superior humanity, of refined depth of feeling, of spiritual beauty.”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“We are not the admirers of the “ideal man” of “social rights, but the proclaimers of the “actual individual”, enemy of social abstractions.

We fight for the liberation of the individual.

For the conquest of life.

For the triumph of our idea.

For the realization of our dreams.

And if our ideas are dangerous, it is because we are those who love to live dangerously.

And if our dreams are mad, it is because we are mad. But our madness is supreme wisdom.”
― Renzo Novatore, The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore

“The human spirit is divided into three streams:
The stream of slavery, the stream of tyranny, the stream of freedom!”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“God:
The creation of a sick fantasy. Inhabitant of senile and impotent brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. A pill for constipated minds. Marxism for the faint of heart.

Humanity:
An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on power, short on truth. An obscene mask painted on the mean face of a shrewd vulgarian for the purpose of dominating the multitude of sentimentalist idiots and imbeciles.

Country:
Penal servitude for the semi-intelligent, a cowshed of imbecility. A Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs. A prostitute for the master, a pimp of the foreigner. Child-eater, parent-slanderer and scoffer at heroes.”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. Its the only swindler, after Judas, that can kill with a kiss.”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“I wish to live my life intensely and embrace my death tragically.”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Real shrewdness means not letting any shrewdness show. It’s not like in the movies. The truly astute don’t sit in the shadows all day striking a pose. They don’t show off that they’re using their brains. They look all carefree and innocent. Some of them are tacky and mawkish, others careless and unserious. What’s critical is not to let others think you’re a person of interest. Let them look down on you or dismiss you and they won’t feel you’re an obstacle. You’re just a broom in the corner. The pinnacle of this is to make them not notice you at all, as if you don’t exist until the moment right before they die at your hands.”
― Cixin Liu

“Why not the eyes of dawn?” “I like twilight better.” “Why?” “When twilight fades, you can see the stars. When dawn fades, all that’s left is…” “All that’s left is the harsh light of reality.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. The mathematical structure of cosmic sociology is far clearer than that of human sociology. The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the immense distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically. First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest