Deak > Deak's Quotes

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d”
― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that . Shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“Technology couldn't revert, but humans could, and they did with startling ease and rapidity when the trappings of the modern world melted away. The tribal animal was always there, hiding just beneath our thin skins of lattes and cell phones and cable TV.”
― Matthew Mather, CyberStorm

“It was a moment in which he felt a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second. Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Nately was instantly up in arms again. "There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!" he declared.

"Isn't there?" asked the old man. "What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for."

"And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver.
I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!”
― Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking