The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
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The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
He went on talking, his eyes fixed on a framed text hanging on the dirty white wall, 'Vengeance is Mine'.
'You take too long, Lord,' he told it. 'I hurry you up a bit.'
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'Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.'
"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
OMG that is awsome! I laughed out loud when I saw that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mariamosis
"I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate."
— John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little
"Precisely so, precisely so," he cried, and his green left eye, which was focused on Berlioz, sparkled. "That's the very place for him! As I told him that time at breakfast, 'As you please, professor, but you've contrived something totally absurd! True, it may be clever, but it's totally incomprehensible. People will laugh at you.'"
Berlioz's eyes popped. "At breakfast... with Kant? What kind of nonsense is this?" he thought.
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
~Mobdy Dick, Herman Melville
"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously: for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."
The Moon and Sixpence- W. Somerset Maughaum
The limits of human life are determind, one may not live beyond them.
War and Peace
He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.
"Life. It's a strange gift and I don't know how we're supposed to use it but I know it's the only gift we get and it's a good one."
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why when we ponder--as sooner of later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade thier souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to beleive that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in thier vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.
Villa Incognito~Tom Robbins
I really appreciate all the quotes, its really fun to read. I don't remember any quote but I know quoted by Shakespeare "Nothing is impossible it is you who make it so."
But where hope rises, fear must lurk behind ...
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'It is nonsense to talk about injuring no one but yourself; it is impossible to injure yourself ... without injuring hundreds, if not thousands, besides, in a greater or less degree, either by the evil you do or the good you leave undone.'
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
The love of battle is the food upon which we live - the dust of the melee is breath of our nostrils! We live not - we wish not to live - longer than while we are victorious and renowned.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.-Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Doc got back to the beach just at early evening, coming up the back slope of the dunes and over, to a hazy view of bay and headlands, a pure sunset of the colors steel takes on as it heats to glowing, lights of airliners, some blinking and some steady, ascending silently from the airport in short clears curves before setting out to traverse the sky, sometimes finding brief conjunction with an early start, then moving on...He decided to stop in at the office, as he was letting himself in, the phone started ringing, quietly, as if to itself."
(Wow)
--Thomas Pynchon, "Inherent Vice"
"It's all over, so let's not burden the telegraph system."
The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress!
"It takes ten Times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart."
-Mockingjay; Finnick Odair.
An interesting one from Camus:
"But too many people now scale the cross merely to be seen from a distance, even if they have to trample him who has been there so long in the process. Too many people have decided to dispense with generosity in order to practice charity. Oh, the injustice, the injustice that has been done him, it rends my heart."
–Albert Camus, The Fall
'Sure, that's what I mean,' Doc Daneeka said. 'A little grease is what makes this world go round. One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'
Yossarian knew what he meant.
'That's not what I meant,' Doc Daneeka said, as Yossarian began scratching his back. 'I'm talking about co-operation. Favors. You do a favor for me, I'll do one for you. Get it?'
'Do one for me,' Yossarian requested.
'Not a chance,' Doc Daneeka answered.
"I will work harder!"
"Napoleon is always right."
(George Orwell, Animal Farm)
'The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.'
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'If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. '
"The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy."
Death of a Salesman
"Then stretched I forth my hand a little forward,
And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn;
And the trunk cried, 'Why dost thou mangle me?"
After it had become embrowned with blood,
It recommenced it's cry; "Why dost thou rend me?"
Dante Alighieri - "The Inferno"; Canto XIII, Longfellow translation
.
thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new professor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Paradise Lost, Book I
This is my first encounter with Milton and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm reading in preparation for a course I hope to take next semester.
The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.
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"You have to let other people be right ... It consoles them for not being anything else."
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"Possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can't say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, all my health."
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"What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth ..."
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"The things you repent were delicious once . . ."
Who is John Galt?
"Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal-for a mind to respect and achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them-while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors-hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom-there terrible hopeless, draining, parlaying boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand
And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die.
I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more-at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire-until the day when men withdraw their vultures.
Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand
Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.
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Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.
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It's strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving the directions.
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"If you always drink vinegar, you don't know anything sweeter exists."
"In Bol we had heard that a few papyrus boats were built large enough to carry forty tons or more, and Mussa claimed thast he had once helped to build a kaday big enough to transport eighty close packed cattle across the open lake. Another had navigated with two hundred men on board. They could be built in any size."
Thor Heyerdhal - The RA Expeditions
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one the immediate purpose of the lie the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on.
Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
J.R.R. Tolkien
"You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!"
Bulgakov
"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man."
Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand