Daeson > Daeson's Quotes

“He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.”
― César Aira, Varamo

“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“How short lived knowledge is. When I was 20 I knew it all: now at 70 I can’t understand a thing”
― Macedonio Fernández

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
― Jean Racine

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

“Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.”
― Francois Sagan

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“The cunning waste their pains;
The wise men vex their brains;
But the simpleton, who seeks no gains,
With belly full, he wanders free
As drifting boat upon the sea.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days

“Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.”
― Luther Burbank

“To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.”
― Théophile Gautier

“We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.”
― Zeno of Citium, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius

“The willing are led by fate, the reluctant are dragged.”
― Cleanthes of Assos, Hymn to Zeus

“No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.”
― Xenophon

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
― Marcel Proust

“Reality can be entered through the main door or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.”
― Gianni Rodari, The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories

“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.”
― James Stephens

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

[Thoughts on Various Subjects]”
― Jonathan Swift , Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

“The Creator made women to please the eye, and to boggle the mind.”
― Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time: Boxed Set

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”
― Tristan Tzara

“The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.”
― Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries

“An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.”
― Knut Hamsun

“The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.”
― Knut Hamsun

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud

“In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
― Sigmund Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873-1939;

“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Then as to churches, they are good, I suppose, else wouldn't good men uphold' em. But they are not altogether necessary. They call 'em the temples of the Lord; but, Judith, the whole 'arth is a temple of the Lord to such as have the right mind. Neither forts nor churches make people happier of themselves. Moreover, all is contradiction in the settlements, while all is concord in the woods. Forts and churches almost always go together, and yet they're downright contradictions; churches being for peace, and forts for war. No, no--give me the strong places of the wilderness, which is the trees, and the churches, too, which are arbors raised by the hand of nature.”
― James Fenimore Cooper