Dave Proff > Dave's Quotes

“In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch”
― Bertrand Russell

“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
― George F. Kennan

“The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.”
― George F. Kennan

“We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
― George F. Kennan

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven!”
― John Keats

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”
― John Updike

“To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.”
― Murray Kempton

“Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila”
― Robert M. Pirsig

“Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep.
War is kind.

Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.”
― Stephen Crane

“What's the use of stories that aren't even true?”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“Science is not a collection of facts. Nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. Science happens in the head. It's a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary perception. Columbus chapter -The Virgin and the Mousetrap”
― Chet Raymo

“And right action is freedom from past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. "The Dry Salvages”
― T.S. Eliot

“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Love is eternal -- the aspect may change, but not the essence. There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free.
But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art.
Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill.
... The artist is the only free man.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.”
― Howard Thurman

“What I have written is but a fleeting intimation of the outside of what one man sees and may tell about the path he walks. No one shares the secret of a life; no one enters into the heart of the mystery.”
― Howard Thurman

“The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived.”
― Howard Thurman

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”
― Bertrand Russell

“He inspired no distrust; his good nature seemed all-pervading; he had the air of one who lavishes disinterested counsel, and ever so little exalts himself with his facile exuberance of speech. The Whirlpool”
― George Gissing

“Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature.”
― George Gissing, New Grub Street

“Will not the publishers be kind? If they knew what happiness lurked in embryo within their foolish cheque-books!”
― George Gissing, New Grub Street

“He liked to feel the soft little hand clasping his own fingers, so big and coarse in comparison, and happily so strong. For in the child's weakness he felt an infinite pathos; a being so entirely helpless, so utterly dependent upon others' love, standing there amid a world of cruelties, smiling and trustful.”
― George Gissing

“The superior thing, in this as in other departments of life, was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual...”
― Rose Macaulay , Mystery at Geneva