M > M's Quotes

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?”
― Edward Albee

“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”
― Toni Morrison

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.”
― Paul Klee

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”
― bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“It is better to burn than to disappear.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
― Albert Camus

“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
― Albert Camus

“I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.”
― Daniil Kharms

“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”
― Clarice Lispector

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say
that we devise their misery. But they
themselves- in their depravity- design
grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.”
― Homer, The Odyssey