Carol Smith > Carol's Quotes

“A nomad I will remain for life,
in love with distant and uncharted places.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“The cowardly belief that a person must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness. There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the non-existent horizon, and her empire is an intangible one, for her domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“Tout le grand charme poignant de la vie vient peut-être de la certitude absolue de la mort. Si les choses devaient durer, elles nous sembleraient indignes d'attachement.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”
― Ken Kesey, Kesey's Garage Sale

“Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New History of the World

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

“More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New History of the World

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said.
"It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.”
― Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”
― Groucho Marx

“Walking and talking - that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New Penguin History of The World

“For a quarter-century British governments had tried and failed to combine economic growth, increased social service provision and a high level of employment. The second depended ultimately on the first, but when difficulty arose, the first had always been sacrificed to the other two. The United Kingdom was, after all, a democracy whose votes, greedy and gullible, had to be placated.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New Penguin History of The World

“Outsiders became keen to join an organization [European Community] that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986.” - written before 2003.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New Penguin History of The World