Josh > Josh's Quotes

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  • #1
    Søren Kierkegaard
    “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
    ― Søren Kierkegaard
    tags: civil-rights, free-speech, free-will, freedom, intelligence, liberty, stupidity
    4214 likes

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  • #2
    Franz Kafka
    “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
    ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
    3772 likes

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  • #3
    David Foster Wallace
    “If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers—not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this— becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.”
    ― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way
    277 likes

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  • #3
    Jean-Paul Sartre
    “It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
    ― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
    1408 likes

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  • #5
    Halldór Laxness
    “For man is essentially alone, and one should pity him and love him and grieve with him.”
    ― Halldór Laxness
    901 likes

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  • #6
    Rabih Alameddine
    “I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.”
    ― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
    tags: biblioholism, book-lust, books, literature, reading, words
    70 likes

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  • #7
    Charlotte Brontë
    “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
    ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
    tags: character, empowerment, flaws, freedom, gender, identity, image, independence, integrity, realism, self-awareness, self-determination, women
    13904 likes

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  • #8
    W.G. Sebald
    “It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
    ― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
    3500 likes

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  • #9
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
    ― Rainer Maria Rilke
    1742 likes

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  • #10
    Alvin Toffler
    “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ”
    ― Alvin Toffler
    tags: futuristic
    785 likes

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  • #11
    Jim Harrison
    “Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend. ”
    ― Jim Harrison
    177 likes

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  • #12
    Garrison Keillor
    “Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
    ― Garrison Keillor
    tags: humor, religion
    30264 likes

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  • #13
    Charles William Eliot
    “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
    ― Charles W. Eliot
    tags: books, friends, reading, teachers
    13929 likes

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  • #14
    Richard Dawkins
    “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
    ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
    tags: atheism, philosophy
    4630 likes

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  • #15
    Paul Bowles
    “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
    ― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
    tags: sheltering-sky-bowles-death-life
    539 likes

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  • #16
    George Bernard Shaw
    “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
    ― George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion
    tags: religion
    338 likes

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  • #17
    Pam Houston
    “I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”
    ― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
    15 likes

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  • #18
    John Barth
    “I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.”
    ― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
    tags: ariz, paradox
    24 likes

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  • #19
    Samuel Beckett
    “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
    ― Samuel Beckett, Endgame
    tags: death, life
    385 likes

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  • #20
    George Carlin
    “Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
    ― George Carlin
    tags: absurdity, belief, credulity, doubt, evidence, gullibility, humor, indoctrination, invisible, reason, skepticism
    1208 likes

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  • #21
    Leo Tolstoy
    “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
    ― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina
    tags: family, first-sentence
    8027 likes

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  • #22
    Salman Rushdie
    “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
    ― Salman Rushdie
    tags: banned-books, censorship, free-speech, intellectual-freedom
    1142 likes

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  • #23
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
    ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works
    tags: bigotry, ignorance, life, prejudice
    1115 likes

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  • #24
    George Carlin
    “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
    ― George Carlin
    tags: attributed-no-source, human-nature, humor, misattributed-george-carlin, stupidity
    3542 likes

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  • #25
    H.L. Mencken
    “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
    ― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
    tags: democracy, elite, elitism, elitist, meritocracy, politics, predictions, voter, voting
    1100 likes

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  • #26
    José Saramago
    “Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.”
    ― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
    tags: death, existentialism, human, human-condition, life, religion
    316 likes

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  • #27
    Stephen Fry
    “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
    ― Stephen Fry
    tags: books, e-readers, kindle, reading
    2712 likes

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  • #28
    Howard Zinn
    “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
    ― Howard Zinn
    tags: nationalism, patriotism, war
    1828 likes

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  • #29
    Fernando Pessoa
    “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
    ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
    tags: literature, reading, solitude
    4216 likes

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  • #30
    Frederick Douglass
    “The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.”
    ― Frederick Douglass
    tags: civil-liberties, equality, race, racism
    222 likes



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