Claude Forthomme > Claude's Quotes

“I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
― Niels Bohr

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
― Carl Sagan

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“To start your quest you need somewhere to begin, and the best place to begin is at the start. - Horus, King of the Gods”
― S.W. Lothian, The Cursed Nile

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Il n’est pas nécessaire d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer."

Roughly translates as: "It is not necessary to be hopeful in order to try, nor to be successful in order to persevere.”
― William of OrangeNassau

“I'll eat you up I love you so.”
― Maurice Sendak

“In order that people may be happy in their work,
these three things are needed:
they must be fit for it;
they must not do too much of it;
and they must have a sense of success in it.”
― John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism

“You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.”
― John Ruskin

“When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”
― John Ruskin

“Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.”
― John Ruskin

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“That's why I read so much. A book isn't going to hurt me. A book isn't going to form some opinion about me that could wreck my life. I learn about so many new and great things from reading. I keep to myself with a good book and a shot of whiskey and I'm right with the world.”
― Paulette Mahurin, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“a memory, any memory, is something about yesterday that you happen to need today.”
― Dael Akkerman, Noema

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats