Huma > Huma's Quotes

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The problem with people that ignore people they dislike is they can’t ignore them. Anger carries a person in your mind forever, whether you choose to speak to them or not. Therefore, don’t mistake prosperity or accomplishments as resolution. You can’t escape what you will not deal with. The day you can stand in the room with someone and not be affected is the day you truly moved on.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”
― Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls and Other Stories

“I’ve been fighting to be who I am all my life. What’s the point of being who I am, if I can’t have the person who was worth all the fighting for?”
― Stephanie Lennox, I Don't Remember You

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”
― Woody Allen

“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship? —David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, in Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963”
― Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. […] If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size; in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Those who will play with cats must expect to be scratched.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”
― Cervantes, Don Quixote

“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

“Until death it is all life”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy

“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy