Timothy > Timothy's Quotes

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don’t love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends … But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he’s always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.”
― Umberto Eco , The Prague Cemetery

“In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“Not that he felt any particular love for himself, but his dislike of others induced him to make the best of his own company.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“I am gripped by an irresistible urge to kill myself, but I know it's the devil tempting me.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.
He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer suivi de Illuminations et autres textes

“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat