Joe > Joe's Quotes

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.”
― Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
― Montesquieu

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
― Joseph Addison

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?"

"Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced — from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”
― Laurence Sterne

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
― René Descartes

“Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.”
― Friedrich von Schiller

“The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”
― Casanova

“We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.”
― Casanova

“Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”
― Petrarch

“The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“The misery that oppresses you lies not in your profession but in yourself! What man in the world would not find his situation intolerable if he chooses a craft, an art, indeed any form of life, without experiencing an inner calling? Whoever is born with a talent, or to a talent, must surely find in that the most pleasing of occupations! Everything on this earth has its difficult sides! Only some inner drive—pleasure, love—can help us overcome obstacles, prepare a path, and lift us out of the narrow circle in which others tread out their anguished, miserable existences!”
― Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von