David > David's Quotes

“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“In Germany they came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up
because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left
to speak up for me.”
― Martin Niemöller

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.”
― Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
― Mark Twain

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
― S.G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire

“He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove