Christopher Dunne > Christopher's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 63

« previous 1 2 3 next »

#1

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

4143 likes

#2

“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.”
― Franz Kafka

88 likes

#3

“Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great.”
― Cher

245 likes

#4

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
― Marilyn Monroe

tags: attributed-no-source, be-yourself, inspirational

49926 likes

#5

“I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.”
― Scott Corbett

tags: reading

111 likes

#6

“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

tags: poetry, sleep

98 likes

#7

“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.”
― Eugene O'Neill

132 likes

#8

“My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his most humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times ... You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Johnson, Vol 4

tags: appropriateness, cant, excess, expression, language, moderation, thought

69 likes

#9

“Let every man be master of his time.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

tags: control, life, self-determination, time

38 likes

#10

“Le meurtre a ceci de comparable avec l'acte sexuel qu'il est souvent suivi de la même question : que faire du corps ?”
― Amélie Nothomb

22 likes

#11

“Se sentir bien est une ambition absurdement exagérée quand se sentir est déjà si rare”
― Amélie Nothomb, Le Voyage d'hiver

24 likes

#12

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: hypocrisy

194 likes

#13

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

tags: knowledge, learning, physics, science

75 likes

#14

“Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.”
― Franza Kafka

26 likes

#15

“Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act.”
― Kenneth Rexroth

tags: creativity

5 likes

#16

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

tags: existentialism

733 likes

#17

“You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters," he raged, at one point in their conversation ...
"Naturally," Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. "It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers.”
― Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down

tags: pseudo-intellectuals

4 likes

#18

“He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

12 likes

#19

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

tags: kurt-vonnegut, slaughterhouse-five

12 likes

#20

“La plupart des gens ne meurent qu'au dernier moment ; d'autres commencent et s'y prennent vingt ans d'avance et parfois davantage.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

tags: mort, nuit

12 likes

#21

“You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority.”
― Richie Norton

tags: a, dreams, goals-priorities, gotta, humor, inspiration, inspirational-quotes, it, leadership, make, management, motivation, motivational-quotes, plan, planning, priorities, prioritize, priority, schedule, schedules, self-help, self-improvement, strategy, success, success-self-improvement, time-management, time-management-time, to, you, your

22 likes

#22

“Sometimes our stop-doing list needs to be bigger than our to-do list.”
― Patti Digh, Four-Word Self-Help: Simple Wisdom For Complex Lives

tags: change, prioritize, relax, simplify, slow-down, to-do-list

39 likes

#23

“Start doing more by doing less.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, BookSmart: Hundreds of real-world lessons for success and happiness

tags: prioritize, prioritizing, prioritizing-your-goals

1 likes

#24

“...I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

12 likes

#25

“Να πεθαίνεις κάθε μέρα. Να γεννιέσαι κάθε μέρα. Ν' αρνιέσαι ό, τι έχεις κάθε μέρα. Η ανώτατη αρετή δεν είναι να' σαι ελεύτερος, παρά να μάχεσαι για ελευτερία.
Μην καταδέχεσαι να ρωτάς: "Θα νικήσουμε; Θα νικηθούμε;" Πολέμα!”
― Νίκος Καζαντζάκης, Ασκητική

12 likes

#26

“It was the poem containing the lines:
Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated.”
― J D Salinger

tags: beauty, poetry

3 likes

#27

“And as the morning steals upon the night, melting the darkness, so their rising senses begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle their clearer reason.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

14 likes

#28

“The world is full of zanies and fools, who don't believe in sensible rules, and won't believe what sensible people say. And because such daft and dewy-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes, impossible things are happening every day.”
― Rogers Hammerstein's Cinderella

tags: impossible, sensible

11 likes

#29

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

tags: life

4845 likes

#30

“Me sentí rodeado de millones de páginas abandonadas, de universos y almas sin dueño, que se hundían en un océano de oscuridad mientras el mundo que palpitaba fuera de aquellos muros perdía la memoria sin darse cuenta día tras día, sintiéndose más sabio cuanto más olvidaba.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La sombra del viento

48 likes

« previous 1 2 3 next »

All Quotes

Christopher Dunne > Christopher's Quotes

Tags From Christopher’s Quotes