KLL > KLL's Quotes

“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.”
― Sun Tzu

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.”
― Albert Einstein, Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace and the Bomb

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“I've seen a rich man beg, I've seen a good man sin
I've seen a tough man cry, I've seen a loser win
And a sad man grin, I heard an honest man lie
I've seen the good side of bad and the downside of up
And everything between

I licked the silver spoon, drank from the golden cup
And smoked the finest green
I stroked the fattest dimes at least a couple of times
Before I broke their heart
You know where it ends, yo, it usually depends on where you start”
― Everlast, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”
― Hugh MacLeod

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“DO NOT PRAY! If you pray, your hands will close together. You will not be able to fight!" -Guts”
― Kentaro Miura

“From where I stand...you're the same as that idol you worship. Completely hollow.”
― Kentaro Miura, Berserk, Vol. 16

“Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
― Henry James, Theory of Fiction: Henry James

“Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”
― Flaubert

“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”
― Stendhal

“Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“The bite of conscience is indecent.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche