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These are some of my favorite quotes from various books
| He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. |
| —Herman Melville, Moby Dick |
| When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. |
| —Herman Melville, Moby Dick |
| God from the mount of Sinai, whose gray top Shall tremble, he descending, will himself In thunder, lightning, and loud trumpets' sound, Ordain them laws; |
| —John Milton, Paradise Lost |
| Heaven lasts long, and earth abides What is the secret of their durability? Is it not because they do not live for themselves That they can last so long? |
| —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching |
| Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression ever again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. |
| —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities |
| nam quae volumus, ea credimus libenter, et quae sentimus ipsi, reliquos sentire speramus
for we readily believe what we wish were so, and we hope that others feel as we do |
| —Julius Caesar, Civil War |
| Être amoureux, c'est voir dans celui ou celle qui vous aime ce qu'on y souhaite et non pas ce qu'on y trouve.
Being in love is to see in someone that which you wish and not that which you find. |
| —Paul Reboux |
| What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. |
| —Shakespeare, Hamlet |
| The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. |
| —Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
| But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. |
| —Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
| Liquor is the opiate of the human bourgeoisie. |
| —Comrade Greeting Card, "Mother's Day", Futurama |
| If I last in this service, you must case me in leather. |
| —Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors |
| You can like the life you're livin' You can live the life you like. |
| —"Nowadays", Chicago |
| There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought. |
| —Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time; Words spoken by character "Grant". |
| They come with fire, they come with axes. Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning! Destroyers and usurpers, curse them! |
| —J.R.R Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Words spoken by character "Treebeard". |
| How can I laugh, when life makes me want to vomit? |
| —Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music; Words spoken by character "Henrik Egerman". |
| Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're all Barbarians; how clear we make it. Oh my piglets we ARE the origins of war. Not history's forces nor the times--not justice nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, kinds of government--nor any other thing--We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside dead bodies, rotting field and stream. Because the living ones are rotten. Oh God can't we love one another just a little. That's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities. We could change the world. |
| —James Goldman, Lion In Winter; Words spoken by character "Eleanor of Aquitaine". |
| The mind is like a fish out of water which thrashes and throws itself about, when thoughts try to shake off their cravings. |
| —Buddha, Dhammapada |
| Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. |
| —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature |
| There is the case where a person, himself being subject to birth, seeing the drawbacks of birth, seeks the unborn, unexcelled rest from the yoke: Unbinding |
| —Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya 26: Ariyapariyesana Sutta, The Noble Search |
| God has granted to every people a prophet in its own tongue. |
| —The Koran |
| Anything too stupid to be said is sung. |
| —Voltaire |
| I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone. |
| —Salvador Dalí, Secret Life |
| What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee: Have at thee, coward! |
| —Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Words spoken by character "Tybalt" |
| Pour noyer la rancoeur et bercer l'indolence De tous ces vieux maudits qui meurent en silence |
| To drown out the bitterness and cradle the indolence Of those elderly outcasts who pass away in silence |
| —Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), "Le vin des chiffonniers" ("The Ragpicker's Wine") |
| No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light. |
| —George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House; words spoken by character Captain Shotover |
|
J'ai tellement pris pour clarté ta chevelure Que, comme lorsqu'on a trop fixé le soleil, On voit sur toute chose ensuite un rond vermeil, Sur tout, quand j'ai quitté les feux dont tu m'inondes, Mon regard ébloui pose des taches blondes! |
| I am so taken by the brightness of your hair That, as one who has stared at the sun too long Sees a bright red disk on everything, After I leave the fires with which you surrounded me, My sight is dazzled by golden spots. |
| —Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac; words spoken by character Cyrano |
| If music be the food of love, play on |
| —Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; words spoken by character Orsino |
| So I chose freedom Running around, trying everything new But nothing impressed me at all I never expected it to |
| —Tim Rice, Don't Cry For Me Argentina |
| En politique comme en séduction, le beau parleur l'emporte. |
| In politics, as in seduction, the good speaker wins. |
| —Ted Stanger, Sacrés Français |
| I'd be fired if that were my job After killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts |
| —They Might Be Giants, Birdhouse in Your Soul |
| If the traveller cannot find a wise friend to go with him, let him go alone. It is better than having a fool for company. |
| —Buddha, Dhammapada |
| You're not mild-mannered. You're often liquored up and rude. |
| —Matt Groening, The Simpsons episode 332, "Simple Simpson", words spoken by character Lisa Simpson |
| Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos. |
| —Matt Groening, The Simpsons episode 154, "Tree House of Horror VII", substory 'Citizen Kang', words spoken by character Homer Simpson |
| "I hate a Roman named Status Quo!" he said to me. "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." |
| —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 |
| This will last out a night in Russia, When nights are longest there; I'll take my leave, And leave you to the hearing of the cause, Hoping you'll find good cause to whip them all. |
| —Shakespeare, Measure for Measure; words spoken by character Angelo |
| I could almost see developing a "smart" bullet that could seek out those who decide on wars in the first place. That would seem to me more fair, and on those grounds I could see welcoming a weapon that eliminated the decision-makers while leaving the innocent unharmed. |
| —Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millenium |
| Even when it most resembles a sport, even when it is most futile, war is always cruelly expensive. And where war is never conclusive, a constant supply of money becomes absolutely essential. ... |
| A state's ability to wage war is largely determined by its people's willingness to pay their taxes. |
| —Tim Parks, Medici Money |
| Come back, or I shall die. |
| —Alessandro Baricco, Silk; Words read by Madame Blanche translated from a letter to Hervé Joncour from a Japanese woman |
| When you can separate the mind from its involvement with all things, the mind is no longer tied to sorrow. Whether sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations are good or bad depends on the mind's going out to fashion them in that way. When the mind lacks discernment, it misunderstands things. When it misunderstands things, it gets deluded under the influence of all things that are binding, both physically and mentally. |
| —Phra Rajavuddhacariya, Gifts He Left Behind |
| Moreover, this blind belief in mere external practices is the cause of much misery and wretchedness in the world. It leads to mental stagnation, to fanaticism and intolerance, to self-exaltation and contempt for others, to contention, discord, war, strife and bloodshed, as the history of the Middle Ages quite sufficiently testifies. |
| —Nyanatiloka Mahathera, Fundamentals of Buddhism |
| I liked those tales [about Woden]. They were better than my stepmother's stories of Cuthbert's miracles. Christians, it seems to me, were forever weeping and I did not think that Woden's worshipers cried much. |
| —Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom |
| The world overflowed with product, old and new; it was impossible to contain it all. At the lower levels, sheer quantity trumped categorization. |
| —Michael Cunningham, Speciman Days |
| I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. |
| —Frank Lloyd Wright |
| 'Wot do you mean?' growled Coavinses, with an appearance of strong resentment. 'Think! I've got enough to do, and little enough to get for it, without thinking. Thinking! (with profound contempt.) |
| —Charles Dickens, Bleak House |
| 'Nature forgot to shade him off, I think?' observed Mr. Skimpole to Ada and me. 'A little too boisterous — like the sea? A little too vehement — like a bull, who has made up his mind to consider every color scarlet? But, I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him.' |
| —Charles Dickens, Bleak House |
| I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex. |
| —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country |
| Jeder auserlesene Mensch trachtet instinktiv nach seiner Burg und Heimlichkeit, wo er von der Menge, den Vielen, den Allermeisten erlöst ist, wo er die Regel "Mensch" vergessen darf, als deren Ausnahme: - den Einen Fall ausgenommen, dass er von einem noch stärkeren Instinkte geradewegs auf diese Regel gestossen wird, als Erkennender im grossen und ausnahmsweisen Sinne. |
| Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority—where he may forget "men who are the rule," being their exception—excepting only the one case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, after a seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. |
| —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil |
| The will of the majority, if out of hand, could lead to "horrible ravages," [John Adams] was sure. "My fundamental maxim of government is never to trust the lamb to the wolf," and in France, he feared, the wolf was now the majority. |
| —David McCullough, John Adams |
| Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit. |
| —Shakespeare, King Lear |
| What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. |
| —Shakespeare, Hamlet |
| Mine are the tears of the Walrus, bemoaning the wholesale carnage of his little oyster friends as he scoops another bivalve into his voracious, sucking maw. |
| —David Rakoff, Don't Get Too Comfortable |
Though much is taken, much abides; and though |
| —Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses |
| I am not a politician and I have never tried to conceal the contempt I have always felt for men who devoted their lives to politics. |
| —Washington Roebling |
| If money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. |
| —Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, words spoken by character Daniel Waterhouse |
| "You have worn forty thousand francs worth of gloves since the first of January last year"? "Apparently so, Bourrienne, since that's what they're asking." |
| —Alexandre Dumas, The Last Cavalier |
| "Those who, like me, have seen both the conqueror of Europe and the American legistator will turn their eyes away from today's political scene: only buffoons, making us laugh or cry, who are not worth looking at." |
| —Alexandre Dumas, The Last Cavalier, words spoken by Chateaubriand of Napolean and Washington |
| "Never give a nosy person room for a comeback. Humor is the great escape." |
| —Frank Delaney, Tipperary, words spoken by Mr. O'brien |
| "The Americans, as it appears to me, are infinitely more occupied about bringing in a given candidate, than they are about the advancement of those measures of which he is concieved to be the supporter." |
| —John Meacham, American Lion, words spoken by a Scottish Visitor to Albany |
| "Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. |
| —John Meacham, American Lion, words spoken by Andrew Jackson |