Maja > Maja's Quotes

“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Her bark is worse than her bite.”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”
― Émile Zola

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”
― Louis Adamic

“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.”
― Philip Pullman

“When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000]”
― Philip Pullman

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

“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
― Richard Dawkins

“[God is] a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser , a misogynistic, homophobic racist, an infanticidal, genocidal, phillicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.”
― Richard Dawkins

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
― Stephen Hawking

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Secret griefs are more cruel than public calamities.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to 'come out,' thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“But that's - I'm sorry, but that's completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn't exist? Do you expect me to get hold of - of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World