Jo > Jo's Quotes

“Karl Marx got a bum rap. All he was trying to do was figure out how to take care of a whole lot of people. Of course, socialism is just “evil” now. It’s completely discredited, supposedly, by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can’t help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to communist China now, which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. You talk about the collapse of communism or the Soviet Union. My goodness, this country collapsed in 1929. I mean it crashed, big time, and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”
― Anaïs Nin

“What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”
― Marcel Proust

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

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

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“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

“Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.”
― Charles de Lint, Moonheart

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“love is the only thing that will save us, independent of any mistakes we may make. Love is always stronger.”
― Paulo Coelho, Aleph

“Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do. Seek out people who aren’t afraid of making mistakes and who, therefore, do make mistakes. Because of that, their work often isn’t recognized, but they are precisely the kind of people who change the world and, after many mistakes, do something that will transform their own community completely.”
― Paulo Coelho, Aleph

“people meet when they need to meet. I have just saved myself from myself.”
― Paulo Coelho, Aleph

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed