democritusjrjr > democritusjrjr's Quotes

“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].”
― Karl Marx

“There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.”
― François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

“For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.”
― Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

“Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.”
― Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

“No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.”
― Thomas Browne

“Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.”
― Thomas Browne

“We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.”
― Sir Thomas Browne, The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne

“He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“If you like not my writing, go read something else.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as [love] can do with a single thread.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.”
― Abe Kōbō, The Woman in the Dunes

“Being free always involves being lonely.”
― Kōbō Abe

“Second-rate minds usually condemn everything beyond their grasp.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”
― Max Stirner

“Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.”
― Max Stirner

“There was never a great genius without a touch of madness.”
― Ben Jonson

“Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.

All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness.”
― Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection

“Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.”
― Joseph Joubert

“Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher.

“There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books