Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”
― A.E. Housman

“Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea.”
― Mikhail Lermontov

“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”
― Boris Pasternak

“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”
― H.H. Munro

“I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.”
― Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower

“I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Ich bin in einer prächtigen Wohnung sogleich faul und untätig. Geringe Wohnung dagegen, wie dieses schlechte Zimmer, worin wir sind, ein wenig unordentlich ordentlich, ein wenig zigeunerhaft, ist für mich das Rechte; es lässt meiner inneren Natur volle Freiheit, tätig zu sein und aus mir selbst zu schaffen.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 1823-1832

“Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren.”
― Robert Musil, Die Schwärmer

“I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“No course was open to me save to leap, with eyes self-bound, into the yawning abyss of the future.”
― William Beckford, The Episodes of Vathek

“Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.”
― Walker Percy

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.”
― Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

“I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“How often we sit weeping — you
and I — over the life we lead!
My friends, if you only knew
the darkness of the days ahead!”
― Alexander Blok, Selected Poems

“Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Manilov was pleased by these final words, but he still couldn't make sense of the deal itself, and for want of an answer, he began sucking his clay pipe so hard that it started to wheeze like a bassoon. He seemed to be trying to extract from it an opinion about this unprecedented business; but the clay pipe only wheezed and said nothing.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“The most frightening thing in the world is to discover the abnormal in that which is closest to us.”
― Kobo Abe

“Sie litten alle unter der Angst, keine Zeit für alles zu haben, und wussten nicht, dass Zeit haben nichts anderes heißt, als keine Zeit für alles zu haben.”
― Robert Musil

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.”
― Philip K. Dick