Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Is love so paltry a thing, to be plucked and dropped to the ground at the first breath of contempt?”
― Steven Erikson, Fall of Light

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing
characteristic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“All the mortal things I had been revering in my life, everything that I was looking up to in awe suddenly came down to eye level in front of me and all the mortal things I had looked down upon and patronized in my life, suddenly rose up to eye level. Now, the world was flat and I was looking it in the eye.”
― Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

“Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland. painted in the imagination's most delicate tints; it is color etherealized. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms - it is all faint, dreamy color music, a far-away, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings. Is not all life's beauty high, and delicate, and pure like this night? Give it brighter colors, and it is no longer so beautiful.”
― Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North: The Incredible Three-Year Voyage to the Frozen Latitudes of the North

“I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.”
― Dante Alighieri

“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

“I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics, just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics. And i saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves; and this is naturally so; first, because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a false belief. And that hostility is increased in proportion to one's greater knowledge of theology. And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became self-evident that theology was itself destroying what it ought to produce.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession