J > J's Quotes

“Many things that I would not care to tell to any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller's stall.”
― Michel Montaigne

“I condemn and detest my country's faults precisely because I am so proud of her many virtues.”
― William Golding

“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“I cannot stand the sight of blood, and once when there was an automobile accident right in front of my eyes, I wheeled round and fled. Yet, I always liked grand destruction. While trembling at the shells and incendiary bombs, I was at the same time tremendously excited at such frenzied annihilation; and yet I believe that I never loved and longed for human beings more than at that time.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, 堕落論 [Darakuron]

“From now until the end of the trial, every time [the jury] entered the court, Farquharson would spring to his feet in the dock and remain standing until they were seated—a protocol that seemed to say my fate is in your hands.”
― Helen Garner, This House of Grief

“Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems

“The memory of having sat at someone's feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I'm trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt.”
― Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro

“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”
― Agatha Christie

“... it did gradually and tenaciously arouse within me a sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would see, the ways they would die.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Surely, I thought, we do not deserve even a little happiness. Or perhaps we had acquired the bad habit of regarding even a little happiness as a big favor, which we would have to repay.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“My conscience was pricked by the happiness of being loved. Or perhaps I was craving some still more decisive unhappiness.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“When I arrived at the house in the suburbs that night I seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. But as I thought about it, the idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I finally decided it would be a ludicrous business. I had an inherent dislike of admitting defeat. Moreover, I told myself, there's no need for me to take such decisive action myself, not when I'm surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of death—death in an air raid, death at one's post of duty, death in the military service, death on the battlefield, death from being run over, death from disease—surely my name has already been entered in the list for one of these: a criminal who has been sentenced to death does not commit suicide. No—no matter how I considered, the season was not auspicious for suicide. Instead I was waiting for something to do me the favor of killing me. And this, in the final analysis, is the same as to say that I was waiting for something to do me the favor of keeping me alive.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“He began thinking about the innocence of machines, about how man had endowed them with intelligence, and, in doing so, had made them an accomplice of his mad adventures. About how the myth of the golem - the machine that rebelled against its creator - was a lie, a fiction invented by the guilty for the sake of self-exoneration.”
― Stanisław Lem

“They have based research off those like me. It’s been peer reviewed. It‘s very reliable. They have learned quite a lot. The odds of a neural mismatch that bad have gone down, and everyone knows that if someone says that it‘s 95% odds, that means no one you know will get it. Because surely you don‘t know twenty people. You are not one in twenty people. Surely.”
― Marissa Meyer

“You know, I never wanted to live past seventy-five,' he says, 'till the day I turned seventy-four.”
― Cate Kennedy, Like a House on Fire

“[Nabokov] was a man who was in love with the sound of words. I think English was his third language. His first language was French and then Russian. And he explained why he liked writing in English better than other languages.

And he gave his example. The white horse. Well, if you say it in French, it's 'le cheval blanc'. But when you say 'cheval', you see a brown horse. You have to adjust your image to make it white. But because we put the adjective first, when the horse comes, it's already white.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions