Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“The true value of man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectability is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand. ”
― Gotthold Lessing

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
― John Anster, The First Part Of Goethe's Faust

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better. ”
― Jose Saramago / ژوزه ساراماگو

“A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.”
― José Saramago

“Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly”
― Jose Saramago

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade- all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design.”
― Kakuzo Okakura, Book of Tea

“You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”
― Niels Bohr

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“So in the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences

“The song being great in its own wealth, why should it wait upon the words? Rather does it begin where mere words fail. Its power lies in the region of the inexpressible; it tells us what the words cannot.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences

“If someone smells a flower and says he does not understand, the reply to him is: there is nothing to understand, it is only a scent. If he persists, saying: that I know, but what does it all mean? Then one has either to change the subject, or make it more abstruse by saying that the scent is the shape which the universal joy takes in the flower.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences

“Mỗi lần rời khỏi một nơi nào đó, thật khó để phân biệt, chúng tôi bỏ đi hay chạy trốn.”
― Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, Cánh Đồng Bất Tận

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Während Wissenschaftler wissen, dass sie nur etwas "glauben" (= für "wahr" halten), was heute angemessen erscheint, morgen aber möglicherweise schon überholt ist, glauben Gläubige, etwas zu wissen, was auch morgen noch gültig sein soll, obwohl es in der Regel schon heute widerlegt ist.”
― Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Manifest des evolutionären Humanismus

“Es ist prinzipiell so, dass Nicht-Existenzen nicht bewiesen werden können! Man könnte behaupten, unser Universum sei in Wahrheit der Verdauungstrakt eines gigantischen, blaugestreiften und doch unsichtbaren Kobolds namens "Gaga Gugelhurz" - und niemand könnte die Nicht-Existenz dieses imaginären Wesens beweisen. Allerdings: Ein solcher Beweis wäre auch nicht notwendig! Warum? Weil nicht derjenige, der die Existenz des Gugelhurz oder des christlichen Gottes bestreitet, Beweise anbringen muss, sondern derjenige, der solch gewagte Thesen vertritt.”
― Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Manifest des evolutionären Humanismus

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion