Tao > Tao's Quotes

“Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others...”
― Schopenhauer

“...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.”
― Schopenhauer

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Libro del desasosiego

“what has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
― Franz Kafka

“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.”
― Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China and other Stories

“What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself. ”
― Franz Kafka

“My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”
― Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

“When I look at small things, I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet...When I look at something too big, I want to die: the Diet Building, or a map of the world...”
― Kobo Abe, The Box Man

“holding a tiny dixie cup in my hand makes me feel like a giant human being that can crush things”
― Brandon Scott Gorrell

“from my chair i can see the street and it seems depressing”
― Brandon Scott Gorrell

“i want to go to the gym
and pretend the weight machines are drums
and play the longest drum solo on them”
― Megan Boyle

“A 5’5”, 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as “ambushing.” No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his “brand new Droid.” As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage’s upper thigh, causing his face to shift from “bemused resignation” to, strangely, “serene bliss,” for what will become the man’s inaugural Facebook profile picture.”
― Megan Boyle

“i had a dream that there were these huge indoor swimming pools called 'lobbies' that poor people used to do mass amounts of laundry”
― Megan Boyle

“i wish i had 15-20 cats that would serve as a blanket, like if i moved they would adjust to my new position, that would be good”
― Megan Boyle

“Anne has small superstitions which she uses to dispel anxieties. For instance, if she can make it to the fourth stain on the carpet by the time the elevator door closes, that means Nate has thought positively about her today, and there is a future where they know each other. It becomes a one-sided competition when a negative consequence is imagined: if she cannot touch two different kinds of tile with her feet by the time the toilet flushes, that means she said something crucially “wrong” in an email, and Nate will never contact her again. She doesn't keep track of which side is winning.”
― Megan Boyle

“Something was comforting about strangers—it seemed like they would exist forever as the same, unknowable mass.”
― Megan Boyle

“seeing a woman cough today made me sense a vague fear of death”
― Brandon Scott Gorrell

“It is 10 PM now, and Godzilla has been sitting at his desk in front of his laptop for six to seven hours. He has accomplished hardly anything today. Godzilla is drinking a lot of beer. He can not stop smoking cigarettes. His room is blue with cigarette smoke, and Godzilla sits on a chair in there, minimizing and maximizing Mozilla Firefox repeatedly. He is not over his girlfriend's house because she said on the cell phone that she needed time, alone, to think about their relationship. Godzilla worries that he will not be able to take care of himself if they break up.”
― Brandon Scott Gorrell