Quotes
You can write the name of a quote, author or book among thousands of quotes.
Guns, Germs And Steel
"Why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than those of the Fertile Crescent or China or India, the ones that colonized America and Australia, took the lead in technology, and became politically and economically dominant in the modern world?"
Book VII
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
Ecce Homo
"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
Stranger
"“I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys.”"
The World As Will and Representation
"That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive."
Never Give In!
"I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire."
Book VII
"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
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."
Gorgias
"Being is unrecognizable unless it manages to seem, and seeming is feeble unless it manages to be."
Book IV
""Let your occupations be few," says the sage, "if you would lead a tranquil life.""
The Duel
"“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”"
Demian
"When authors write novels, they usually act as if they were God and could completely survey and comprehend"
Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
"Physiologists and molecular biologists regularly fall into the trap of overlooking this distinction, which is fundamental to biology, history, and human behavior. Physiology and molecular biology can do no more than identify proximate mechanisms; only evolutionary biology can provide ultimate causal explanations."
Demian
"this second, violent world gushed out fragrantly everywhere, except in our rooms, where Mother and Father were. And that was very good. It was wonderful that here among us there was peace, order, and repose, duty and a clear conscience, forgiveness and love—and wonderful that all the rest existed, all those noisy, glaring, somber, and violent things, which nevertheless could be escaped with a single bound toward one’s mother."
Narcissus and Goldmund
"„One thing, however, did become clear to him [Goldmund] – why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing – mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.“"
Fragments
"The best of men choose to know the One above all else; It is the famous "Eternal" within mortal men. But the majority of men are complacent, like well-fed cattle. They revel in mud; like donkeys, they prefer chaff to gold."
1984
" “What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?” "
Atomic Habits
"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."
Siddhartha
"“I wish that you, oh exalted one, would not be angry with me,” said the young man. “I have not spoken to you like this to argue with you, to argue about words. You are truly right, there is little to opinions. But let me say this one more thing: I have not doubted in you for a single moment. I have not doubted for a single moment that you are Buddha, that you have reached the goal, the highest goal towards which so many thousands of Brahmans and sons of Brahmans are on their way. You have found salvation from death. It has come to you in the course of your own search, on your own path, through thoughts, through meditation, through realizations, through enlightenment. It has not come to you by means of teachings! And—thus is my thought, oh exalted one—nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! You will not be able to convey and say to anybody, oh venerable one, in words and through teachings what has happened to you in the hour of enlightenment! The teachings of the enlightened Buddha contain much, it teaches many to live righteously, to avoid evil. But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands. This is what I have thought and realized, when I have heard the teachings. This is why I am continuing my travels—not to seek other, better teachings, for I know there are none, but to depart from all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal by myself or to die. But often, I’ll think of this day, oh exalted one, and of this hour, when my eyes beheld a holy man.”"
Demian
"All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?"
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer."
Works of Love
"The relationship between the individual and God, the God-relationship, is the conscience."
The Gay Science
"Keeping up appearances, living in borrowed finery, wearing masks, the drapery of convention, play-acting for the benefit of others and oneself ... the constant fluttering of human beings around the one flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that there is virtually nothing which defies understanding so much as the fact that an honest and pure drive towards truth should ever have emerged in them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images; their eyes merely glide across the surface of things and see 'forms'; nowhere does their perception lead to truth."
Fragments
"Those who believe themselves wise regard as real only the appearance of things, but these fashioners of falsehood will have their reward."
Following the Equator
"The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."
Either/Or
"How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech."
The Prince
"“Prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles, and for choice to take the lesser evil.”"
Never Give In!
"War is mainly a catalogue of blunders."
To the Lighthouse
"It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."
Midnight Library
"She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best."
Notes from Underground
"Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?"
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
"Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better."
Notes from Underground
"When... in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?"
Demian
"an being above and a fish below. But each one is a gamble of Nature, a"
The Antichrist
"Great intellects are skeptical."
The Concept of Anxiety
"When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it."
Reflections on Literature and Morality
"Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves."
Diary
"Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all."
Diary of a Madman
"[P]eople think that the human brain is in the head. Nothing of the sort; it is carried by the wind from the Caspian Sea."
The American Claimant
"Drag your thoughts away from your troubles — by the ears, by the heels, or any other way, so you manage it."
Dubliners
"Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse."
Works of Love
"A man who had two sons ... went to the first and said, "Son, go out and work in my vineyard today." But he answered and said, "I will not," but afterward he repented of it and he went. And the father went to the second and said the same. But he answered, "I will, sir," and he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?"
The Hobbit
"The greatest adventure is what lies ahead, Today and tomorrow are yet to be said, The chances, the changes are all yours to make, The mold of your life is in your hands to break."
Book II
"No state sorrier than that of the man who keeps up a continual round, and pries into "the secrets of the nether world," as saith the poet, and is curious in conjecture of what is in his neighbour's heart."
Beyond Good and Evil
"I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!"
Man's Search For Meaning
"We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation-just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer-we are challenged to change ourselves."
The Wanderer and His Shadow
"A little health now and again is the ailing person’s best remedy."
On Duties
"Injustice often arises also through chicanery, that is, through an over-subtle and even fraudulent construction of the law. This it is that gave rise to the now familiar saw, "More law, less justice.""
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*Ck
"Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience."
Man's Search For Meaning
"It isn't the past which holds us back, it's the future; and how we undermine it, today."