Ricardo Rodríguez Quintero > Ricardo's Quotes

“All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.”
― Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura

“With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.' That’s the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.”
― John R. Searle

“Nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.”
― Lucretius

“In general, I feel if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.”
― John R. Searle

“So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.”
― Lucretius

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume 5, 1709–1713

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.”
― Henry James

“Because the eye has seen, thoughts are structured upon images and not upon ideas.”
― David Consuegra, On Trademarks: A Thesis

“The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Chile, el golpe y los gringos

“Our true nationality is mankind.”
― H.G. Wells

“I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“My coming brought no profit to the sky,
Nor does my going swell its glory;
My two ears have never heard anyone that could say,
Why I came here and why I will go away.”
― Omar Khayyám

“-Debo comunicarle una cosa muy importante, monsieur, todos damos asco. Somos todos maravillosos, y todos damos asco.”
― Alessandro Baricco, Silk

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.”
― Paul Auster, Oracle Night

“A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd.”
― Paul Auster

“History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.”
― Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Después reflexioné que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y sólo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mí...”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones