Adrian > Adrian's Quotes

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
― Socrates

“The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.”
― Kay Ryan, Say Uncle

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts”
― Jose Saramago

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”
― George Eliot

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.”
― George Eliot

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”
― George Eliot

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”
― George Eliot

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow;
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.”
― Ben Jonson

“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
― Winston Churchill

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
― Pauline Kael

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
― Amelia Earhart

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
― Stephen Hawking

“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
― Dinah Maria Craik

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
― Ben Okri

“There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success…Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox.”
― John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Hannah Arendt