Desislava > Desislava's Quotes

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  • #1
    Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    “Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
    Kurt Vonnegut

  • #2
    Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
    Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

  • #3
    Isaac Asimov
    “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
    Isaac Asimov

  • #4
    Daniel Keyes
    “Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
    Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

  • #5
    Italo Calvino
    “The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”
    Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

  • #6
    Aldous Huxley
    “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
    Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

  • #7
    J.R.R. Tolkien
    “Never laugh at live dragons.”
    J.R.R. Tolkien

  • #8
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna
    “Escribir es que le dejen a uno llorar y reír a solas".”
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna

  • #9
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna
    “Nerviosismo de la ciudad: no poder abrir el paquetito de azúcar para el café.”
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna

  • #10
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna
    “Amor es despertar a una mujer y que no se indigne.
    (Love is when you wake up a woman and she is not mad at you.)”
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna

  • #11
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna
    “Era un pintor tan viejo que se le habían quedado calvos los pinceles.
    (He was such an old painter that his brushes had gone bald.)”
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna

  • #12
    Daniel Keyes
    “Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”
    Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

  • #13
    Daniel Keyes
    “Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”
    Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

  • #14
    Daniel Keyes
    “No one really starts anything new, Mrs. Nemur. Everyone builds on other men's failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.”
    Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

  • #15
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
    "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  • #16
    Italo Calvino
    “Sections in the bookstore

    - Books You Haven't Read
    - Books You Needn't Read
    - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
    - Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
    - Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
    - Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
    - Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
    - Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
    - Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
    - Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
    - Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
    - Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
    - Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
    - Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
    - Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
    - Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
    - Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
    - Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
    - Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
    Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

  • #17
    Erich Maria Remarque
    “It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”
    Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

  • #18
    John Stuart Mill
    “Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.”
    John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

  • #19
    Roger Zelazny
    “I took Jack his slippers this evening and lay at his feet before a roaring fire while he smoked his pipe, sipped sherry, and read the newspaper. He read aloud everything involving killings, arsons, mutilations, grave robberies, church desecrations, and unusual thefts. It is very pleasant just being domestic sometimes.”
    Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October

  • #20
    Stanisław Lem
    “Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
    Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
    "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
    "Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

    Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
    Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
    Their indices bedecked from one to n,
    Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

    Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
    And every vector dreams of matrices.
    Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
    It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

    In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
    Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
    Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
    We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

    I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
    Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
    And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
    And in bound partition never part.

    For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
    Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
    Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
    Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

    Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
    Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
    A root or two, a torus and a node:
    The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

    Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
    The product of our scalars is defined!
    Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
    Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

    I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
    I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
    Bernoulli would have been content to die,
    Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!”
    Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

  • #21
    Søren Kierkegaard
    “Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • #22
    Seneca
    “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
    Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • #23
    Stephen Fry
    “I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective”
    Stephen Fry

  • #24
    Desislava Daskalova
    “Числата са мистерия, чрез която простото става сложно – повтаряше си тя и се надяваше някой ден да научи достатъчно математика, за да повярва на старата поговорка: числата са чудо, чрез което сложното става просто.”
    Desislava Daskalova, Спътници

  • #25
    Desislava Daskalova
    “– Магия ли? – подсмихна се в отговор Валцер, сякаш през цялото време беше чакал да им отвърне точно на този въпрос. – Вие, които престъпяте този праг, магия всяка тука оставете. Това е наука.”
    Desislava Daskalova, Спътници

  • #26
    C.G. Jung
    “Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”
    Carl Jung



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