Katja > Katja's Quotes

“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
― Leon C. Megginson

“The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ...
In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.
The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best. ”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The true leader is always led.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”
― Paul Bowles

“The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.”
― Paul Bowles

“She was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Outside the wind blew by; in here there was nothing but the beating of the hot sun on the skin. He lay a while, intensely conscious of the welcome heat, in a state of self-induced voluptuousness. When he looked at the sun, his eyes closed almost tight, he saw webs of crystalline fire crawling across the narrow space between the slitted lids, and his eyelashes made the furry beams of light stretch out, recede, stretch out. It was a long time since he had lain naked in the sun. He remembered that if you stayed out long enough the rays drew every thought out of your head. That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to feel the vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doubts and hesitations that covered the floor of his being were curling up and expiring in the great furnace-blast of the sun.”
― Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down

“Once you accept the fact that life isn't fun, you'll be much happier," his mother said to him.”
― Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down