Seth > Seth's Quotes

“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)”
― Montaigne

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Youth is insolent; it is its right – its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence…
”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.”
― Bob Dylan

“Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
― Bob Dylan

“Sirens wailed; the revolution had come to Harrisonville. Blood was flowing on Pearl Street.”
― Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse

“Where could you go in Harrisonville?-this smalltime place haunted by by homilies, platitudes, and booshwah.”
― Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse

“They were liberating Harrisonville, showing the hypocrites and phonies and $$$-squirrelers and chokeragged Yesmen some puffed-up balls. They were widening the mental horizons of a town more narrow-minded than its streets; they were missionaries laboring amon their bloodkin: montheytheistic theocentric cousins and uncles who swore allegiance to Uncle Sam, Jim Crow, Oral Roberts, and Dale Carnegie; they were waging their impudent revolution against people they'd cowedly called "sir" all their teenage lives.”
― Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse

“He'd been down at the Cass County Library, reading...Win danced a jig he thought that was so funny...about this cat Henry David Thoreau, which he pronounced Toe-Row. He read about his life and read some of his writings and this cat really had his shit together...Toe-Row knew better than anybody that Life is a Big Fat Asshole with everybody trying to Stick It To You when they get half the chance.”
― Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse

“EGAD was a coffeehouse, built for the kids of Harrisonville by a middle-aged Jesus Freak. Its letters meant "Everybody Give A Damn!”
― Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse

“They were hometown hippies who primped in the cracked mirror of their egos and saw themselves as more intelligent, more humane, more real than their plastic deodorized elders. They were the victims of a freeze-dried generational racism which would not forgive their long loathsome hair and their scuzzy tramp-clothes. So now, cast in a psychodrama partly of their own design, they grew their hair even longer and let their jeans get grubbier. They asked for it: the audience reaction was confirmation of all their halfbaked theories. They screamed "Fuck You!" with every gesture and found applause in the cops' teeth-gnashings and housewives' cringings.”
― Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse

“If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.”
― Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.”
― Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World

“After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise you might as well stay at home.”
― Nicolas Bouvier

“Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become...Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday that are fables to us today?”
― Montaigne

“It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as of inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“When I am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I have in gaming with her?”
― Michel de Montaigne, Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection

“From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well...”
― Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude