Victoria > Victoria's Quotes

“And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”
― Marcel Proust

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

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said 'I think I’ll drink whatever comes out of these when I squeeze ’em?”
― Bill Watterson

“If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“If peace comes from seeing the whole,
then misery stems from a loss of perspective.

We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.

Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?

It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.

When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.

In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s hard to tell the truth without them.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“The greatest risks are never the ones you can see and measure, but the ones you can’t see and therefore can never measure. The ones that seem so far outside the boundary of normal probability that you can’t imagine they could happen in your lifetime—even though, of course, they do happen, more often than you care to realize.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“VaR has been called “potentially catastrophic,” “a fraud,” and many other things not fit for a family book about statistics like this one. In particular, the model has been blamed for the onset and severity of the financial crisis. The primary critique of VaR is that the underlying risks associated with financial markets are not as predictable as a coin flip or even a blind taste test between two beers. The false precision embedded in the models created a false sense of security. The VaR was like a faulty speedometer, which is arguably worse than no speedometer at all. If you place too much faith in the broken speedometer, you will be oblivious to other signs that your speed is unsafe. In contrast, if there is no speedometer at all, you have no choice but to look around for clues as to how fast you are really going.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“Some people live as though they are already dead. There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

“What is love? Love is treating your heart with a great deal of tenderness, with understanding, love, and compassion. If you cannot treat your own heart this way, how can you treat your partner with understanding and love?”
― Hanh Nhat Thich, You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

“Don’t wait to start living. Live now! Your life should be real in this very moment.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

“By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History