Chini > Chini's Quotes

“But you see," said Roark quietly, "I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you.”
― Steve Martin

“I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside.”
― Rumi

“After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.”
― Rabindranath Tagore