Quotes
You can write the name of a quote, author or book among thousands of quotes.
Demian
"Only the thoughts that we live out have any value."
Book VII
"To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing – here is perfection of character."
Day's Collacon
"Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively; strive to get clear notions about all; give up no science entirely, for science is but one."
Baudolino
""The Poet had, who had made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves — which, as Niketas remarked with a smile — was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love."
Never Give In!
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old."
Beyond Good and Evil
"Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experiences in common."
12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos
"“So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them — at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.”"
Major Barbara
"He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."
The Grapes of Wrath
"Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments."
Book III
"...undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens. "
The Waves
"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely."
12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos
"“Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.”"
Don Quixote
"A closed mouth catches no flies."
The Fellowship of the Ring
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Republic
"“A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.”"
1984
"“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” "
Northanger Abbey
"To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive."
Julius Caesar
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once."
The Post Office Girl
"Someone who's on top of the world isn't much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who's troubled about something is on the alert. The perceived threat sharpens his senses - he takes in more than he usually does."
The Analects of Confucius
" "A superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions.""
Discourses
"It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?"
Monday or Tuesday
"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
Don Quixote
"History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth."
Anna Karenina
"All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Twilight of the Idols
"Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong, again and again--- the reason being that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. Darwin forgot the mind (---that is English!): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind, one must need mind---one loses it when one no longer needs it. [Criticism of Darwin's Origin of Species.]"
Don Quixote
"Tell me thy company, and I'll tell thee what thou art."
The Art Of War
"He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks."
Siddhartha
"“Even in him, even in your great teacher, I prefer the thing to the words, his actions and his life are more important than his speech, the gestures of his hand more important than his opinions.”"
East Of Eden
"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
Day's Collacon
"Respect of parents curbs the spirit and restrains vices."
Letters To Milena
"“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”"
A Woman of No Importance
"Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building."
Don Quixote
"All sorrows are less with bread."
The Two Towers
"It is a comfort not to be mistaken at all points."
History as a System
"I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds … This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology."
Mansfield Park
"An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged: no harm can be done."
Prometheus Misbound
"I do not love men: I love what devours them."
Fragments
"Those who believe themselves wise regard as real only the appearance of things, but these fashioners of falsehood will have their reward."
Counsels and Maxims
"The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary."
The Trials Of Socrates
"[In the world below...] The wise and orderly soul is conscious of her situation, and follows in the path; but the soul which desires the body, and which... has long been fluttering about the lifeless frame and the world of sight, is after many struggles and many sufferings hardly and with violence carried away by her attendant genius, and when she arrives at the place where the other souls are gathered, if she be impure and have done impure deeds or have been concerned in foul murders or other crimes... from that soul everyone flees and turns away; no one will be her companion, no one her guide, but alone she wanders in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled..."
The Post Office Girl
"Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it's gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny."
Guns, Germs And Steel
"Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots."
Mark Twain's Notebook
"Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children."
Fragment
"Do not so much be ashamed of that disgrace which proceeds from men's opinion as fly from that which comes from the truth."
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*Ck
"Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would."
Surrounded by Idiots
"“The most important lesson that you can walk away with is that the idiots who surround you are, in fact, not idiots at all. Instead, they are individuals worthy of respect, understanding, and being valued.”"
Great Expectations
"Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together."
Never Give In!
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
Discourses
"For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death."
Discourses
"In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles."