Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“There is a false saying: “How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“我赤身裸體，被丟進最不幸的時代的嚴寒之中，乘著人間的馬車與非人間的馬，四處飄蕩。我的毛皮大衣掛在馬車上，我卻無法觸及它，而那些四肢靈活的流氓病人們，卻連一根手指都不願意動。被騙了！被騙了！只要聽信一次夜間急救鈴的假警報——就永遠無可挽回了。”
― 法蘭茲．卡夫卡(Franz Kafka), 卡夫卡中短篇全集#3

“there is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it”
― Roman Rolland

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Moon and Sixpence

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”
― Franz Kafka

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker”
― Mike Leigh, Naked and Other Screenplays

“As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays in Love

“Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muss eine Welt zerstören.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Beauty will save the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“you are boys, your God is a woman. If you are women, your God is a boy. If you are men, your God is a maiden. The God is where you are not. So: it is wise that one has a God; this serves for your perfection. A maiden is the pregnant future. A boy is the engendering future. A woman is: having given birth. A man is: having engendered.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition