Aida > Aida's Quotes

“And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained. —Hegel”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The cunning waste their pains;
The wise men vex their brains;
But the simpleton, who seeks no gains,
With belly full, he wanders free
As drifting boat upon the sea.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days

“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance