Philippe Corrot > Philippe's Quotes

“Lots of things can be fixed. Things can be fixed. But many times, relationships between people cannot be fixed, because they should not be fixed. You're aboard a ship setting sail, and the other person has joined the inland circus, or is boarding a different ship, and you just can't be with each other anymore. Because you shouldn't be.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
― Plato

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Remember that you are a Black Swan.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.
This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.)
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality);
and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.”
― Salvador Dali

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
― John Lennon

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
― Anne Frank

“Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.”
― Albert Einstein