Mj > Mj's Quotes

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.”
― Siddhartha Gautama

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

“belief is the death of intelligence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. ”
― Graham Greene

“Never say that I have taken it, only that I have given it back.”
― Epicurus

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can’t give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they’re terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it’s all because we’re afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Somewhere en route to Port Via in the New Hebrides, for my last meal I serve dinner the way I've always dreamed.
Anybody caught buttering their bread before breaking it, I promise to shoot them.
Anybody who drinks their beverage with food still in their mouth will also be shot.
Anybody caught spooning toward themself will be shot.
Anybody caught without a napkin in their lap-
Anybody caught using their fingers to move their food-
Anybody who begins eating before everybody is seved-
Anybody who blows on food to cool it-
Anybody who talks with food in their mouth-
Anybody who drinks white wine holding their glass by the bowl or drinks red wine holding their glass by the stem-
You will each of you get a bullet in the head.
We are 30,000 feet above earth, going 455 miles per hour. We're at a pinnacle of human achievement, we are going to eat this meal as civilized human beings.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician. And they have just crossed the border into Scotland and they see a brown cow (and the cow is standing parralel tot the train). And the economist says, 'Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.' And the logician sais, 'No. there are cows in Scotland of which one, at least, is brown.'And the mathematician says, 'No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”
― Hypathia of Alexandria

“It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes. Impressions gather on the surface of the mind, film by film, as ice gathers upon the surface of still water, but often so lightly that they claim no definite recognition from the consciousness. Then a point is reached where the accumulated impressions become a definite emotion, and the mind realizes that something has happened. With something of a start, Johnson suddenly recognized that he felt nervous–oddly nervous; also, that for some time past the causes of this feeling had been gathering slowly in his mind, but that he had only just reached the point where he was forced to acknowledge them.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Kit Bag

“Time passes so quickly. And if time passes quickly in time, how much more, then, in eternity!”
― Grant Allen, Wolverden Tower

“He's smiling at me. I want to say something to him, but the words keep evaporating, vanishing off my tongue before I have a chance to say them. I can taste them, but I can't tell if they are sweet or sour.
Is he smiling at me, or is he sneering? I can't tell.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“How attractive, how delectable, the prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who will never grant it. I can still feel the pull of a man like that, of his promising and refusing. I would still like to know things. Never mind facts. Never mind theories, either.”
― Alice Munro, The Turkey Season

“Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young man - somebody told me as much. And it is true. He'll make the Governor's Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate." "What makes you think so?" Mrs. Morse had inquired. "I've heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the platitudes of the average voter that - oh, well, you know you flatter any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to him.”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“It's better to write than dare to live, even if living is nothing more than buying bananas...”
― Fernando Pessoa, O Livro do Desassossego

“Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end--to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things--even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos--ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? ... Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“He supposed he was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn't going to pan out the way you'd always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn't fathom. Life offered none of those prizes you'd been looking forward to since adolescence (he less than others, but looking forward to them all the same, if only out of curiosity). Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you'd been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future-illusion; a non-existent period of constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment, yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all. It was a mug's game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn't any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell should there be”—which is as near as you ever came to sophistication—you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointment by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by living in a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact.”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“Tis life you should fear--life, with its dangers, its toils, its heartbreakings.”
― Grant Allen, Wolverden Tower

“If tissue samples--including blood cells--became patients' property, researchers taking them without consent and property rights up front would risk being charged with theft. The press ran story after story quoting lawyers and scientists saying that a victory for Moore would "create chaos for researcher" and [sound] the death knell to the university physician-scientist." They called it "a threat to the sharing of tissue for research purposes," and worried that patients would block the progress of science by holding out for excessive profits, even with cells that aren't worth, millions like Moore's.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks / Natives / Why Im No Longer Talking To White People About Race

“Should she call Maria? Wasn't that what a good mother would do? It had been months since they last spoke.They weren't estranged so much as exhausted by the effort it took to steer conversation past all that they couldn't manage to say. It was safer to stay on separate shores than to navigate an ocean cluttered with icebergs.”
― Anthony Marra, Mercury Pictures Presents

“See,” she cried, “the river-bank— the
dark rushing stream. Ah, we are all alone,
side by side, far away from every one.
Fool! if you could read my heart, would
you walk so near to the giddy brink ? Do
you think the memory of the old love will
stay my hand when the chance comes?
Old love is dead: you beat it, cursed it to
death. How fast does the stream run ?
Can a strong man swim against it ? Oh,
if I could be sure — sure that one push
would end it all and give me freedom!
Once I longed for love — your love. Now
I long for death — your death. Oh, brave
swift tide, are you strong enough to free
me forever ? Hark ! I can hear the roar of
the rapids in the distance. There is a deep
fall from the river cliff; there are rocks.
Fool ! you stand at the very edge, and look
down. The moment is come. Ah !”
― Hugh Conway, Victorian Christmas Stories: 13 Scary Ghost Stories to Read on A Dark, Snowy Night

“Laying the cornerstone in 1833, Biddle extolled the need for public instruction in the United States; in other countries it may be “a private misfortune” to be “uneducated and ignorant,” but in America “it is a public wrong,” because the “general equality of power would be dangerous, if it enabled an ignorant mass to triumph by numerical force over the superior intelligence which it envied.”
― John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science