B. > B.'s Quotes

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Poverty never spoils a good man, but prosperity often does. It’s easy to stand hard times, because that’s the only thing you can do, but in good times the fool-killer has to do night work.”
― George Lorimer, Letters From A Merchant To His Son: Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son Classics, Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son George Horace Lorimer Illustrated and Annotated

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I’m going to pee.' hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“The only genius that's worth anything is the genius for hard work.”
― Kathleen Winsor

“One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

“Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.”
― H. Rider Haggard, She

“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
― Albert Camus

“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”
― Albert Camus

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“What feminism means for me is simply that women, like men, are complete human beings with limitless possibilities.”
― Fahmida Riaz

“Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth: Stage Adaptation

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Some salesmen think that selling is like eating—to satisfy an existing appetite; but a good salesman is like a good cook—he can create an appetite when the buyer isn't hungry.”
― George Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

“Worrying is the one game in which, if you guess right, you don’t get any satisfaction out of your smartness. A busy man has no time to bother with it.”
― George Lorimer, Letters From A Merchant To His Son: Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son Classics, Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son George Horace Lorimer Illustrated and Annotated

“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
~ Falsely yours”
― Kinky Friedman

“If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl,’ said Sa’di, a Persian poet from the thirteenth century.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“On the abstract level, I have turned the belief in my own fallibility into the cornerstone of an elaborate philosophy. On a personal level, I am a very critical person who looks for defects in myself as well as in others. But, being so critical, I am also quite forgiving. I couldn't recognize my mistakes if I couldn't forgive myself. To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.”
― George Soros, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve

“What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.”
― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

“You must learn to wait properly... By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension”
― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

“It is much easier to put existing resources to better use, than to develop resources where they do not exist.”
― George Soros

“It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.”
― George Soros

“When men evaluate each other as men, they still look for the same virtues that they’d need to keep the perimeter. Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency. Men have always had a role apart, and they still judge one another according to the demands of that role as a guardian in a gang struggling for survival against encroaching doom. Everything that is specifically about being a man—not merely a person—has to do with that role”
― Jack Donovan, The Way of Men