Thomas Hall > Thomas's Quotes

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I have lived my life in the shelter of too many northern alliances. I have made alliance with the gentle cow, the health department, the local policeman. In the shelter of such alliances I have got out of bed in the morning with moderate assurance that I shall still be alive at bedtime. But south of the moon my allies vanish, and I have an emptiness in my stomach. I fear the cobras in the garden. I lack a treaty with the lioness. I dread the crocodiles of Lake Victoria, the tsetse fly in the Tanganyika bush, the little airplane with the funny engine, and the mosquito in the soft evening air. But most of all, I am afraid of the African street.”
― Robert Ardrey

“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
― Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation Into the Animal Origins and nature of Man

“The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.”
― Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations

“language is never neutral”
― Paulo Freire

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire

“The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...”
― Paulo Freire

“The multitude is always in the wrong.”
― Paulo Freire

“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

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
― Charles Addams

“Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“Is it not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

“The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.”
― Masha Gessen, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage: Ou Meditations De Philosophie Eclectique, Sur Le Bonheur Et Le Malheur Conjugal

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
― Honore de Balzac

“All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.”
― Andre Aciman

“By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.”
― Fatema Mernissi

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.
Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should
meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and
swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into
the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken
to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs,
dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s
master. And every day without fail one should consider himself
as dead.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“He went outside, desperate for something, anything—an embrace or a blow to the head.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.”
― loren eiseley

“Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time

“For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“The truth is, however, that there is nothing very “normal” about nature. Once upon a time there were no flowers at all.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall, there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master Ittei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai