Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“You don’t have to live your life the way
other people expect you to.”
― Chris Guillebeau, A Brief Guide to World Domination

“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and i can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
― A.J. Liebling

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
― A.J. Liebling

“Experience life in all possible ways --
good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,
summer-winter. Experience all the dualities.
Don't be afraid of experience, because
the more experience you have, the more
mature you become.”
― Osho

“Listen to your being. It is continuously giving you hints; it is a still, small voice. It does not shout at you, that is true. And if you are a little silent you will start feeling your way. Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost. Risking all to be oneself, that's what maturity is all about.”
― Osho

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela

“The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.”
― Lester Bangs

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.”
― Jim Thompson

“There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver