dersteppenwolf > dersteppenwolf's Quotes

“La poesía es algo hermoso, pero no vale la pena que se te congele el culo por ella.”
― Paul Auster

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The stores along Hollywood Boulevard were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible- it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

“Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.”
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

“...vamos, que es ideal cuando la propia víctima se alegra de que la lleven al matadero.”
― Fiodor Dostoyevski, The Gambler

“Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The main weakness of competitiveness policy as currently practiced in Latin America is deficient implementation and lack of evaluation of programs, rooted in lack of coordination among state agencies.”
― Evelyne Huber, Models of Capitalism: Lessons for Latin America

“You haven’t experienced awkwardness until you’ve seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Para mí el frente es un siniestro remolino.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Sin Novedad en el Frente

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Y tenía noventa años cuando mencionó, por última vez, con sus ojos humedecidos, al remoto Ernestito. Lo que prueba que los años, las desdichas, las desilusiones, lejos de facilitar el olvido, como se suele creer, tristemente lo refuerzan.”
― Ernesto Sabato, Antes del fin

“Why sit and stare at a box beaming messages indoctrinating us into consumer culture for hours a day when there are so many more enjoyable alternatives available?”
― Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and our Health—and a Vision for Change

“I remember when my daughter was just learning her letters. She was playing in her room and came downstairs to ask me, “Momma, what does C-H-I-N-A spell?” “China,” I told her (she knew what the word meant—she had friends from there). “So,” she asked next, “why is it written on everything?”
― Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and our Health—and a Vision for Change

“It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Las más bellas morales humanas están todas fundadas sobre la idea de que es preciso luchar y sufrir para purificarse, elevarse y perfeccionarse; pero ninguna trata de explicar por qué es necesario empezar de nuevo sin cesar. ¿Dónde va, pues, en qué abismos infinitos se pierde, desde eternidades sin límites, lo que se ha elevado en nosotros y no ha dejado vestigios? ¿Por qué si el Anima Mundi es soberanamente sabia ha querido estas luchas y estos sufrimientos que jamás han llegado y que, por consecuencia, jamás llegarán al fin? ¿Por qué no haber puesto, al primer esfuerzo, todas las cosas al punto de perfección a que nosotros creemos que tienden? ¿Por qué es preciso merecer su dicha? Pero ¿qué méritos pueden tener los que luchan o sufren mejor que sus hermanos, puesto que la fuerza o la virtud que les anima no la tienen más que porque un poder exterior la ha puesto en ellos más propiciamente que en otros?”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the White Ant

“These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“O que não sei dizer é mais importante do que o que eu digo.”
― Clarice Lispector

“Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Y mientras descendían hasta el camino habría sido difícil decir cuál de los dos eran don Quijote y quién Sancho”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Un hombre de cuarenta y cinco años puede creerse joven todavía hasta el momento en que se da cuenta de que tiene hijas en edad de amar. El príncipe se sintió súbitamente envejecido. Olvidó las millas que recorría cazando, los «Jesús María» que sabía provocar, la propia lozanía actual al final de un largo y penoso viaje. De pronto se vio a sí mismo como una persona canosa que acompaña un cortejo de nietos a caballo en las cabras de Villa Giulia.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Clearly, the whole concept of “retirement” is about to undergo a major overhaul. People will have to work later in life, at least part-time, and perhaps as long as they are able. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as there is some evidence that most people are actually happier with a phased retirement 85 just so long as they perceive a sense of choice in the matter.86 On the other hand, a “gray crime wave” has now begun in Japan: Arrests of struggling pensioners over age sixty-five has doubled—mostly for shoplifting and pickpocketing—and the number incarcerated has tripled to over 10% of Japan’s prison population.87 It is also apparent that some big cultural shifts will be needed in the way we treat and value our elderly. “Our society must learn that ageing and youth should be valued equally,” writes Leonard Hayflick of the UCSF School of Medicine, “if for no other reason than the youth in developed countries have an excellent chance of experiencing the phenomenon that they may now hold in such low esteem.”
― Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

“Unfortunately, there is no rule saying a city must be a nice place to live in order to attract fast population and economic growth. Parks, good governance, and smoothly flowing traffic are optional, not required. Sometimes cities grow at an astonishing rate, despite being hell on Earth.”
― Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

“Far less tragic—and certainly less attention-grabbing—was a second, very profound event that also happened in 2008. Its exact timing will never be known, but at some instant during the year, the number of people living in urban areas grew to briefly match, for a few seconds, the number of people living in rural areas. Then, somewhere, a city baby was born. From that child forward, for the first time in our history, the human race became urban in its majority.”
― Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future