Never Give In!
"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
Moby Dick
"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers."
Book VIII
"There are three relations [between thee and other things]: the one to the body which surrounds thee; the second to the divine cause from which all things come to all; and the third to those who live with thee."
Fragments
"The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become."
Oedipus
"Loyalty gives traitors opportunity."
The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People
"“It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. People will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake.”"
Lying Fully Clothed
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
Dead Souls
"The reason why Proshka wore such large boots can be explained at once: Plyushkin kept only one pair of boots for all of his servants, however numerous they were, and they always stood in the hall."
Parerga and Paralipomena
"Pride is an established conviction of one's own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race."
Never Give In!
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last."
Republic
"“Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”"
A Hunger Artist
"“He alone knew something that even initiates didn’t know how easy it was to fast.” "
The Alchemist
"Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure."
Le Pere Goriot
"„Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.“"
The Art Of War
"When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move."
The Art Of War
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
Gorgias
"Man and woman and speech and deed and city and object should be honored with praise if praiseworthy and incur blame if unworthy, for it is an equal error and mistake to blame the praisable and to praise the blamable."
Three Guineas
"In short, if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art."
The Gambler
"And now once again I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once more I could not answer, that is to say, again, for the hundreth time, I answered that I hated her."
Barnaby Rudge
"Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort."
Counsels and Maxims
"How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do."
Man's Search For Meaning
"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for."
So Be It; or, The Chips Are Down
"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."
Book IV
"Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past."
Demian
"Oh, I know it today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!"
The Fellowship of the Ring
"It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill."
Stages on Life's Way
"I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly as good as man-period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors."
Bleak House
"It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations."
Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
"The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the gift is acknowledged; it is the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that is weighed."
Siddhartha
"“You, Venerable One, may indeed be a seeker, for, striving toward your goal, there is much you do not see which is right before your eyes.”"
The Art Of War
"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."
The Picture of Dorian Gray
"It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But ... it is better to be good than to be ugly."
Don Quixote
"Sing away sorrow, cast away care."
Essays
"One may be humble out of pride. "
Between the Acts
"Books are the mirrors of the soul."
The Analects of Confucius
" "They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.""
A Christmas Carol
"It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour."
Great Expectations
"Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade."
The Art Of War
"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."
The Picture of Dorian Gray
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
Human, All Too Human
"Christianity came into existence to lighten the heart, but now it needs to burden the heart to start with so it can lighten it afterwards. Consequently, it will perish."
On The Laws
"Let the punishment match the offense."
Fragments
"All things come into being by conflict of opposites."
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*Ck
"The problem to giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to be overly attached to the superficial and the fake."
Sand and Foam
"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity."
The Prince
"“Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”"
Book IV
"Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them."
To the Lighthouse
"What is the meaning of life?... A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark."
Guns, Germs And Steel
" Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples. "