Pippa > Pippa's Quotes

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
― Oliver Sacks

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“I am a part of all that I have met.”
― Alfred Tennyson, The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson

“Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted.”
― Sophocles

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”
― Bill Watterson

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death

“Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,
But good men starve for want of impudence.”
― John Dryden, The Poetical Works of John Dryden

“I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.”
― Calvin Coolidge

“A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.”
― China Miéville, King Rat

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
― Émile Zola

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.”
― Steve Jobs

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke