jude > jude's Quotes

“But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“In other terms: that God and the father never existed (or if they did, it was so long ago, perhaps during the Paleolithic). All they did was kill a dead man, from time immemorial.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

“As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.”
― Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“You will learn it,' said Vasudeva, 'but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.'
...Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid thing, this repetition, this course of events in a fateful circle?...
The river laughed. Yes, that was how it was. Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.”
― André Gide

“The opposite of every truth is just as true.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Poor boy," the libertine then said, "he builds machines to count the infinite, and we have terrified him with the eternal silence of too many infinities. Voila, the end of a fine vocation.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Aren’t you strong enough to walk alone? We must each of us find God by ourselves.”
― André Gide, Strait is the Gate

“I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“My words are unerring tools of
destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Hamm: What's he doing?
(CLOV raises lid of NAGG's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: He's crying.
(He closes lid, straightens up)
Hamm: Then he's living.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret. ”
― Hermann Hesse