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Quotes by Writer
"Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them."
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"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."
24
"I hate the outdoors. To me the outdoors is where the car is."
24
"The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair."
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"A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same."
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"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking."
24
"I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world."
24
"Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn't remember. Life is strange, isn't it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you're shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that's the story of my 'breaking-and-entering' period."
24
"believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic."
24
"In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable."
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"First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination."
24
"Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still."
24
"Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets."
24
"The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills - when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels."
Body,
24
"They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit."
24
"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes."
24
"I was dying to have a cat. But they wouldn't let me. My mother hated them. Not once in my life have I managed to get something I really wanted. Not once. Can you believe it? You can't understand what it's like to live like that. When you get used to that kind of life--of never having anything you want--then you stop knowing what it is you want."
24
"Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on."
24
"Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better."
24
"A babe at the breast is as much pleasure as the bearing is pain."
24
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
24
"The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."
24
"The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter."
24
"Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good."
24
"The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself."
24
"Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective."
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"It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary."
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"To know how to hide one's ability is great skill."
24
"I once took a city with five men and a lame goat. If I can do that, you can convince the necromancers to pledge themselves to you. Do this or die."
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"But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it."
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"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
24
"Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."
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