Kent > Kent's Quotes

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

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Dare to think!”
― Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“But to unite in a permanent religious institution which is not to be subject to doubt before the public even in the lifetime of one man, and thereby to make a period of time fruitless in the progress of mankind toward improvement, thus working to the disadvantage of posterity - that is absolutely forbidden. For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind.”
― Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.

That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind...”
― Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
― George Washington Burnap, The Sphere and Duties of Woman: A Course of Lectures

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

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury

“First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”
― Ray Bradbury

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

- The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“Never make a decision when you need to pee.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”
― Leonard Cohen

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.”
― Doris Lessing

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.”
― Isabel Allende

“Happiness is pure kitsch; we come into the world to suffer and learn.”
― Isabel Allende, La suma de los días

“Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted.”
― Isabel Allende, The Infinite Plan

“You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.”
― Isabel Allende