Gregory > Gregory's Quotes

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.”
― William Wordsworth, The Excursion 1814

“There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart.

-Michael: A Pastoral Poem”
― William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney

“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.”
― William Wordsworth

“Love betters what is best”
― Wordsworth

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Habit rules the unreflecting herd.”
― William Wordsworth

“...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Until death it is all life”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed
beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to
establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which
may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the
hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other
principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every
single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress
upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and
harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably,
and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
― F.A. Hayek

“Nothing forces us to know
What we do not want to know
Except pain”
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides