top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared."
71
"Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank."
71
"To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor."
71
"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."
70
"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away."
70
"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside."
70
"And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens."
70
"Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated."
70
"You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."
70
"It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world."
70
"There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow."
70
"She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape."
69
"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better."
69
"Somehow, the more I get older, and the more I see of people and sadness and illness and everything, the sorrier I get for everyone."
69
"A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate."
69
"I also identify as a Latin person, a person who has Latin blood."
68
"If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive."
68
"The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth."
68
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
67
"Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love."
66
"The starting point of all achievement is desire."
66
"All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense."
66
"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up."
66
"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
65
"The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests."
65
"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
65
"All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning."
65
"Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success."
64
"Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way."
64
"They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling. But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean-only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?""What did they mean about you?""Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality."
64
"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean."
64
bottom of page