Ben > Ben's Quotes

“Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.”
― Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces

“A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time—pills or stairs. —Joan Welsh”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
― Seneca

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
― Pindar

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“A civilization’s memory resides in the continuity of its institutions.
The revolution that interrupts a civilization’s memory, by destroying those institutions, does not relieve society of a bothersome caparison that is paralyzing it, but merely forces it to start over.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?”
― Paul Valéry

“Research is the highest form of adoration”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”
― Jack London, The Turtles of Tasman

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch

“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.”
― Peter Senge

“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

“It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.”
― Millard Fuller

“If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss. You have to turn into a dragon and stir up a whirlwind, tear the dark, brooding clouds asunder and soar up into the azure-blue sky.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that?”
― St. Bonaventure

“It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.”
― Roger Scruton

“as a young man I thought the ideal philosophical argument was one with the following property: someone who understood its premises and did not accept its conclusion would die.”
― Robert Nozick