alex jader > alex's Quotes

“Autumn is my spring!”
― August Strindberg, A Dream Play

“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
― Tennessee Williams

“You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours—ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.

If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed”
― Viktor Shklovsky

“And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”
― Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique

“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.”
― John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Love consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one's freedom on behalf of another.”
― John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good.”
― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.”
― J.G. Ballard

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”
― Meister Eckhart

“And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.”
― Meister Eckhart

“For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe-that unless I believe I shall not understand.”
― St. Anselm

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“Your library is your paradise.”
― Desiderius Erasmus

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
― Desiderius Erasmus

“The desire to write grows with writing.”
― Erasmus

“The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.”
― Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“For anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

“Just as nothing is more foolish than misplaced wisdom, so too, nothing is more imprudent than perverse prudence. And surely it is perverse not to adapt yourself to the prevailing circumstances, to refuse 'to do as the Romans do,' to ignore the party-goer's maxium 'take a drink or take your leave,' to insist that the play should not be a play. True prudence, on the other hand, recognizes human limitations and does not strive to leap beyond them; it is willing to run with the herd, to overlook faults tolerantly or to share them in a friendly spirit. But, they say, that is exactly what we mean by folly. (I will hardly deny it -- as long as they will reciprocate by admitting that this is exactly what is means to perform the play of life.)”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus , Praise of Folly

“The Stoics define wisdom to be conducted by reason, and folly nothing else but the being hurried by passion, lest our life should otherwise have been too dull and inactive, that creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason; and reason he confined within the narrow cells of the brain, whereas he left passions the whole body to
range in.

Farther, he set up two sturdy champions to stand
perpetually on guard, that reason might make no assault,
surprise, nor inroad ; anger, which keeps its station in
the fortress of the heart ; and lust, which like the signs
Virgo and Scorpio, rules the appetites and passions.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Praise of Folly

“[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“You wouldn't abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn't control the winds.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men's hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.”
― Sir Thomas More, Utopia