Sam > Sam's Quotes

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”
― Erica Jong

“Life is wasted on the living.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the "Quixote" and Hamlet a spectator of "Hamlet"?... these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“The acts of madmen exceed the previsions of the sane.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

“Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“The soul is like an uninhabited world
that comes to life only when
God lays His head
against us.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine”
― St.Thomas Aquinas

“Better to illuminate than merely to shine to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“How is it they live in such harmony, the billions of stars, when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds?”
― Thomas Aquinas

“The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles: Volumes 1-4 in Five Books

“Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.”
― William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals