Robert Randell > Robert's Quotes

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster

“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.”
― Washington Irving

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
― Peter Shaffer, Five Finger Exercise

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age. ”
― George Burns

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. ”
― W.C. Fields

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.”
― Mae West

“The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors

“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
― Janet Frame

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.”
― Edward Gibbon

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke