Jan > Jan's Quotes

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?”
― Ayn Rand

“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
― Aristotle

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
― Aristotle

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“It took a long time for me to realize that my understanding of human behavior was relevant to my interest in the design of technology. As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.”
― Don Norman , The Design of Everyday Things

“I'm not so weird to me.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
― Alfred Adler

“What harm could come from just watching a videotape?”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring