In my sojourn of readings, I often stumble upon phrases which hold some special meaning for me, which appeal to some fundamental part of my soul. Often, I try to remember them long enough to add them as quotations to my site. However, it's now gotten to the point where I am constantly barraged by a delude of other people's thoughts. So, swiping a page from the design of Corbeau's Abode, I decided to devote a single section to quotes. Once I get tired of old sayings, I'll send them here for everyone to peruse at leisure, to be replaced by fresh and exciting ideas on the actual web page. Hope you all enjoy.
The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
- Horace Walpole
You were born with the yearning arrow.. it points to the stars and when it cannot reach them, it falls back to pierce your heart.
- Isobelle Carmody, Darkfall
This is the bitterest pain among men, to have knowledge but no power.
- Herodotus
Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage. I had that courage.
- Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Love not what you are, but what you may become.
- Miguel de Cervantes
I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
- Mae West
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.
- Paul Tournier
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
- Aristotle
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
- Francis Bacon
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest the gods.
- Socrates
The sweetest of all sounds is praise.
- Xenophon
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
- Mark Twain
Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.
- Plato
Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.
- Johnathan Swift
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
- John Ernst Steinback
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
- W. H. Auden
You must look into people, as well as at them.
- Lord Chesterfield
It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.
- Seneca
The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.
- Molière
Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.
- Jean de La Bruyère
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and my friend, I hope I should have the courage to betray my country.
- E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
- Henry David Thoreau
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
- Henry B. Adams
You are obstinate. Pliant. Merry. Morose. All at once. For me there's no living with you, or without you.
- Martial
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
In the long run we are all dead.
- John Maynard Keynes, Tract on Monetary Reform
There is strong shadow where there is much light.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Achilles exists only through Homer. Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory.
- François René de Châteaubriand
Even God cannot change the past.
- Agathon
How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.
- Alfred de Musset
What would we do right now if there was a Divinely Enlightened Being living on the planet?
- Edward Kowalczyk, lead singer of Live.
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission- Nikki Giovanni, 'Ego Tripping'
I criticize by creation - not by finding fault.
- Cicero
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.- Matthew Arnold, 'The Grande Chartreuse'
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
- Mark Twain
Wounds are all I'm made of.
- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Veteran of the Psychic Wars'
I remember the very thing that I do not wish to; I cannot forget the things I wish to forget.
- Cicero
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
- Henry Ward Beecher
The universe is a machine where you have been placed, and like a machine the outcome can be known; every battle has already been won or lost; all that is left is for you to choose your side.
- Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, The Art of War
I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
- Stella Adler
I don't like work - no man does - but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know.
- Joseph Conrad
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
- Arthur C. Clarke
To hold a pen is to be at war.
- Voltaire
In art, the best is good enough.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When therefore a single individual among people at large can be found, whose virtue is so outstanding as to outstrip that of all the rest, then it becomes just that this one man should be royal and sovereign over all things, and that this one man should be ruler.
-Aristotle, The Politics
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Many imagined they were wise, but knew not what they needed - for their profit I let them ask questions; their reward was to learn from my words.
- Wotan, Wagner's Siegfried
Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
It saddens me that literacy has become suspect, and degraded, given how many millions of years of evolution were spent developing the ability to create language.
- J. Michael Straczynski
We are that what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
- Aristotle
Writers are exorcists of their own demons.
- Mario Vargas Llosa
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
- Leonardo Da Vinci
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Society and man are mutually dependent enemies and the writer's job [is] to go on forever defining and defending the paradox lest, God forbid, it be resolved.
- Arthur Miller
At worst may the gods smile on you, at best may they ignore you.
- Xenophon, Lion of Macedon
O Lord, if there is a Lord,
Save my soul, if I have a soul -- Ernest Joseph Renan
...we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. - But what if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?
- Nietzsche
When someone is gone from your life for a really long time, you start to forget stuff about them. Like, you forget what their voice sounded like, and how they loved you so much, and how everything you did was completely okay with them, and how that meant, in a weird way, that you could actually do amazing things. I'm not a very good student, and applying to college isn't so easy for me, so right now, what I am doing is I'm trying very hard to remember my mother's voice. Because I really need to hear it now. I'm listening for her to say to me what she always used to say: Anything's possible, Bailey. Anything.
- Bailey Salinger, Party of Five
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
- Clarence Darrow
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art, as of life.
- Joseph Conrad
In a world of god and monsters, when you stare into the abyss, realise that it is looking back- when fighting monsters, pray you do not become that which you have vowed to destroyed.
- Nietzsche
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
- Leonardo Da Vinci
School is a battlefield for your heart.
- Angela, My So-Called Life
Men are willing to fight for, kill for, die for religion - anything but live for it.
- Anonymous (paraphrased)
The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
- François René de Châteaubriand
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Berlioz
He is funny and caustic and charming and aggressive and stylish and offensive and brilliant and opinionated and short...He is Lilliput's answer to King Kong. He is Munchkinland's answer to Godzilla. He is science fiction's answer to the world.
- David Gerrold, describing Harlan Ellison
I'm a story-teller. I'm a professional liar.
- Harlan Ellison
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?
- Victor Hugo
I see music as the augmentation of a split second of time.
- Erin Cleary
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.
- Jean de La Bruyère
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
- Don Marquis
One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
- Nietzsche
We live, as we dream - alone.
- Joseph Conrad
Now he goes along the dark road, whence they say no one returns.
- Catullus
Death twitches my ear. "Live," he says: "I am coming."
- Martial
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