Quotes

  • “Each place has its own advantages - heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.” - Mark Twain
  • “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” - Matt Groening
  • “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.” - Albert Einstein
  • “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic.” - Albert Einstein
  • “To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt. At long last to be discharged.” - Albert Einstein
  • “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” - Albert Einstein
  • “The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
    ” - Albert Einstein
  • “I am not only a pacifist, but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace.” - Albert Einstein
  • “There is nothing divine about the scientist’s morality; it is a purely human affair.” - Albert Einstein
  • “One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before having solved it.” - Carl Ludwig Siegel, mathematician
  • “The universe is so vast, and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice.” - Vivian Rosewarne, Wellington bomber copilot
  • “Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.” - Albert Einstein
  • “Writing requires a dour temperament and failure in life seems so key to success in writing; it has a way of stripping away illusion.” - Cary Tennis
  • “I’m one of those people who believe that deep change comes through difficult surrender: surrender of protection, surrender of the sense of knowing what we’re doing; I believe in shamanistic transformation through trial and madness.” - Cary Tennis
  • “This is the true joy of life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” - George Bernard Shaw
  • “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me.” - George Bernard Shaw
  • “It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” - George Bernard Shaw
  • “The difference between good advice and bad advice is how we internalize it. “Always stand up for your principles” becomes “Always burn your bridges”.” - Al Franken
  • “We become divided when we neglect the inner life of symbols. We neglect the inner life of symbols when the outer life of objects consumes us. The world of things exhausts us because it gives nothing back; the objects don’t breathe, they don’t sing; even a diamond ring just glitters in silence.” - Cary Tennis
  • “The searing intensity of pure knowledge of being — it would whiten your bones and leave you on the road, tumbling like the husk of an insect.” - Cary Tennis
  • “Words realize nothing, verify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)” - Mark Twain
  • “Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.” - Jules Renard
  • “I had one single ambition, in which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment; and I recognise myself as having unmistakably failed in it. (a letter to a friend concerning his writing career)” - C.S. Lewis
  • “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” - Gustave Flaubert
  • “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” - Wilson Mizner
  • “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
    ” - Anais Nin
  • “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.” - William Faulkner
  • “Hope is no rational consolation, it’s just a way to stave off madness.” - Cary Tennis
  • “The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
    from “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”" - J. D. Salinger
  • “As boys we learn to fight for what we want. Despite the warmest and most caring of parental attempts to neutralize our savage honor and round off the jagged edges of our gender, we poke through and draw blood. We follow a primitive code until we’re old enough to reason.” - Cary Tennis