maple > maple's Quotes

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
― Sun-Tzu, A Arte da Guerra

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment