John > John's Quotes

“What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?”
― Lawrence Durrell

“The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values. ”
― Lawrence Durrell

“The silent bear no witness against themselves.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.”
― Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

“Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”
― Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

“What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“Sooner or later you’ve heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love. The same holds true for music. ”
― Ned Rorem, The Later Diaries of Ned Rorem 1961 1972

“When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. "Things as they are" are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become "things as perceived by your wishes.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Poverty is a giant who uses your features like a piece of cotton waste to wipe a filthy world. ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“If good happens, good; if bad happens, good. ”
― Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version

“What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.”
― Hermann Hesse

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ”
― Hermann Hesse

“Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action. ”
― Hermann Hesse

“When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding. ”
― Hermann Hesse

“Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown: thus our lament resounds – across shallow swamps. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None