Quotes

Here's some of my favorite quotes I've collected over the years:

• "...melancholy is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor."
  - Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to The Writings of Donald Barthelme
  
• "If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?"
  - E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, t. by Richard Howard.
  
• ... and the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why Live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible. ...
  ... They quit trying so hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more then an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle."
  - Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles.
  
• "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."
  - Wernher von Braun
  
• "The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what i've written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself."
  - Franz Kafka
  
• "All the seas, everywhere,
  Are brothers one to another.
  Why then do the winds and waves of strife
  Rage so violently through the world"
  - written by Emperor Meiji on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, in 1904
  
• "God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions."
  - Jean Pierre de Caussade
  
• "Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose? ... Doesn't each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one's jokes, talents, idiocies?"
  - J.D. Salinger
  
• "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity be lacking, the others are useless."
  - Gustave Flaubert
  
• "'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that,' says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, memory yields."
  - Friedrich Nietzsche
  
• “One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind”
  - Alphonse Bertillon
  
• "I ask you to think on the hours when one sleeps. Do you know what happens then? The body may lie still in bed, but what happens to the thoughts - the spirit? With what ancient demons does it spend its time? And in what deeds?"
  - The Isle of Dead
  
• "Boredom is merely unenthusiastic hostility."
  - Unknown
  
• "Sincere poetry must have the perfections that escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and it must have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a moment of dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams of one poet and of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary of the sword."
  - W.B. Yeats
  
• ... Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
  To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
  But do not hurry the voyage at all.
  It is better to let it last for many years;
  and to anchor at the island when you are old,
  rich with all you have gained on the way,
  not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
     Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
     Without her you would have never set out on the road. ...
  - Constantine Cavafy
  
• "In Plain Text, that Brass Voice announc'd,-- 'The Business of the World is Trade and Death, and you must engage with that unpleasantness, as the price of your not-at-all-assur'd Moment of Purity.--Fool.'"
  - Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
  
• "It was a magical interlude, and like all such interludes, all too brief: 'The things we have never had remain: it is the things we have that go...'"
  - William Burroughs, forward to Beat Hotel
  
• The time I've lost in wooing,
  In watching and pursuing
     The light that lies
     In woman's eyes,
  Has been my heart's undoing.
  Though Wisdom oft has sought me,
  I scorn'd the lore she brought me,
     My only books
     Were woman's looks,
  And folly's all they've taught me.
  - Thomas Moore
  
• "Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."
  F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
• The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become."
  - Ashley Montagu
  
• "When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized that that could never occur, because every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and every moment is just the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line."
  - Deborah Eisenberg
  
• "Meanwhile there are love and compassion. Constantly abstracted. But let them be made indefatigable, implacable to surmount all obstacles, the inner sloth, the distaste, the intellectual scorn; and, from without, the other's aversions and suspicions. Affection, compassion - and also, meanwhile, this contemplative approach, this effort to realize the unity of lives and being with the intellect, and at last, perhaps, intuitively in an act of complete understanding. From one argument to another, step by step, towards a consummation where there is no more discourse, only experience, only unmediated knowledge, as of a color, a perfume, a musical sound. Step by step towards the experience of being no longer wholly separate, but united at depths with other lives, with the rest of being. United in peace."
  - Aldous Huxley
  
• "Humor tends to be anger with its makeup on."
  - Stephen King
  
• "Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it then a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane."
  - Thomas Pynchon

A few that i've always liked that are interconnected

• It is easy in the world to live after the word's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
  - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
• If you can keep your head when all about you
  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
  But make allowance for their doubting too; ...
  - From If, a poem by Rudyard Kipling

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