Carr > Carr's Quotes

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“El amor verdadero no era precisamente uno de esos absolutos; pregunta en la cual la palabra <>, sin embargo, tenía tanto que ver con la empleada por Kant o Hegel como la palabra <> con un descarrilamiento o un terremoto, con sus aullidos y su sangre. Bruno respondía que, a su juicio, la calidad del amor que hay entre dos seres que se quieren cambia de un instante a otro, haciéndose de pronto sublime, bajando luego hasta la trivialidad, convirtiéndose más tarde en algo afectuoso y cómodo, para repentinamente convertirse en un odio trágico o destructivo".”
― Ernesto Sábato, Sobre héroes y tumbas

“Creo que la esencia de la vida consiste en ser fiel a lo que uno cree su destino”
― Sabato Ernesto

“Un día, los hombres descubrirán un alfabeto en los ojos de las calcedonias, en los pardos terciopelos de la falena, y entonces se sabrá con asombro que cada caracol manchado era, desde siempre, un poema.”
― Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps

“What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?”
― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."

[The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)]”
― Stephen W. Hawking

“Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.”
― Stephen Hawking

“When reason fails, the devil helps!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

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

“The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.”
― Stephen W. Hawking

“Deje de decir nosotros, tenga la valentía de decir yo.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Acide sulfurique

“«Si quieres ser feliz, vive escondido»”
― Amélie Nothomb, Les Catilinaires

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“my heart has more rooms in it than a whore house”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”
― Umberto Eco

“While they go get the others, I figure out the details. The system I’ve set up is intended to "process’’ matches. It does this by moving a quantity of match sticks out of their box, and through each of the bowls in succession. The dice determine how many matches can be moved from one bowl to the next. The dice represent the capacity of each resource, each bowl; the set of bowls are my dependent events, my stages of production. Each has exactly the same capacity as the others, but its actual yield will fluctuate somewhat.”
― Eliyahu M. Goldratt

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“Suele ser tan ingenuo el incrédulo absoluto como el que todo lo cree; pertenecen en el fondo a una misma categoría psicológica.”
― Rodolfo Walsh, Operación Masacre

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“To be understood is to prostitute oneself”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
― Herman Melville

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
― Sun tzu, The Art of War

“Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities