The Wanderer and His Shadow
"A little health now and again is the ailing person’s best remedy."
The Castle
"Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him... he won't understand a word of it."
Fragment
"Those who are well constituted in the body endure both heat and cold: and so those who are well constituted in the soul endure both anger and grief and excessive joy and the other effects."
Animal Farm
"They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes."
If it Die
"When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near."
Mrs. Dalloway
"The truth is ... that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness."
A Room of One's Own
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
Book VII
"Adorn thyself with simplicity and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that Law rules all. And it is enough to remember that law rules all."
Never Give In!
"In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings."
A Room of One's Own
"The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
Man's Search For Meaning
"Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life."
Essays and Letters
"In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering; and ... consequently, this feeling should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals."
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Truly, whoever possesses little is that much less possessed: praised be a little poverty!"
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight."
Great Expectations
"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade."
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*Ck
"Because there’s an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also infinite number of ways we can discover that we don’t measure up."
Ulysses
"There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."
Great Expectations
"Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together."
The Art Of War
"He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign."
Surrounded by Idiots
"“A more effective way to spot a liar is to notice if he puts the palm of his hand on his chest — preferably his right hand over his heart — and sighs indignantly when he’s been accused of lying.”"
Hard Times
"Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."
Man's Search For Meaning
"Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."
The Art Of War
"A leader leads by example, not by force."
Mark Twain's Notebook
"Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so."
Great Expectations
"In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter."
A Woman of No Importance
"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything."
The Alchemist
"Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure."
The Witch of Portobello
"You are what you believe yourself to be"
Atomic Habits
"If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead."
The Grapes of Wrath
"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it."
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
"Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst."
Les Misérables
"To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!"
Fear and Trembling
"Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid. Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar goes further. Perhaps it would be untimely and ill-timed to ask them where they are going."
Essays
"It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private. "
The Portrait of Mr. W.H.
"All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction."
Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
"Behavior evolves through natural selection, just as anatomy does. Hence if sex is enjoyable, natural selection must have been responsible for that outcome."
Never Give In!
"If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law."
Cannery Row
"It has always seemed strange to me ... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success."
East Of Eden
"It's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world."
Beware of Pity
"The avaricious are thrifty with time as well as money."
Book III
"Be not unwilling in what thou doest, neither selfish nor unadvised nor obstinate; let not over-refinement deck out thy thought; be not wordy nor a busybody."
the Revolt of the Masses
"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone."
Fathers and Sons
"Bazarov, who had a special capacity for winning the confidence of lower-class people, though he never cringed to them and indeed treated them casually; "
Moby Dick
"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep."
Dead Souls
"The gentleman lolling back in the chaise was neither dashingly handsome nor yet unbearably ugly, neither too stout nor yet too thin; it could not be claimed he was old but he was no stripling, either. His arrival in the town created no stir and was not marked by anything out of the ordinary."
Psychology of the Unconscious
"Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown."
Book II
"As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion."
Sand and Foam
"There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea"
The Trials Of Socrates
"As there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises from too great confidence of inexperience; you trust a man and think him altogether true and good and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially within the circle of his most trusted friends, as he deems them, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. ...The reason is that a man, having to deal with other men, has no knowledge of them; for if he had knowledge he would have known the true state of the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval between them."