Karel > Karel's Quotes

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“We’re young, we’re not monsters, no fools: we’ll conquer happiness for ourselves.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

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

“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
― Theodor Adorno

“Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”
― Bertolt Brecht

“In the faces of men and women, I see God.”
― Walt Whitman

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“And remember, the truth that once was spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Herbert Kretzmer

“Oh mighty God, how great is your animal kingdom, there’s no shortage of idiots.”
― Heinz Rein, Berlin Finale - English edition

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present - I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey