Karun Nagarajan > Karun's Quotes

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“(...) a Universe composed of one-trillionth part matter to one decillion parts black velvet futility.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά

Nothing beautiful without struggle.”
― Plato, The Republic

“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”
― Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

“We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.”
― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling...”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work

“If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“This is perhaps one of the most important things I learned during this investigation: We see what we believe, and not just the contrary; and to change what we see, it is sometimes necessary to change what we believe.”
― Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

“Those who love wisdom must investigate many things”
― Heraclitus

“Does a man who is acting on the stage in a female part forget that he is a man? Similarly, we too must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are