Quotable Quotes
"Life, says Erasmus's Folly, is theater: we each have lines to say and a part to
play. One kind of actor, recognizing that he is in a play, will go on playing
nevertheless; another kind of actor, shocked to find he is participating in an
illusion, will try to step off the stage and out of the play. The second actor
is mistaken. For there is nothing outside the theater, no alternative life one
can join instead. The show is, so to speak, the only show in town. All one can
do is to go on playing one's part, though perhaps with a new awareness, a comic
awareness." [-- JM Coetzee]
"Literature is not like music; it isn't for the young; there are no
prodigies in writing. The knowledge or experience a writer seeks to
transmit is social or sentimental; it takes time, it can take much
of a man's life, to process that experience, to understand what he
has been through; and it takes great care and tact, then, for the
nature of the experience not to be lost, not to be diluted by the
wrong forms. The other man's forms served the other man's thoughts."
[-- VS Naipaul]
"Most people are not really free. They are confined by the
niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to
fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision."
[-- VS Naipaul]
"The essence of being human [rather than a saint] is that one does not seek
perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of
loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and
broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon
other human individuals." [-- George Orwell]
"Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness,
but veiled from view, deep down, invisible ... But it is there, not hostile, not
reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it
will come." [-- Franz Kafka]
"I am neither a pessimist, nor an optimist; I
watch, I examine, without any preconceived notion, without any prepared
idealism, and I am in no hurry to reach a verdict ... I prize every fleeting
pleasure, every minute of joy, for there are fewer and fewer of them ... I
should not say that my present point of view is a particularly consoling one,
but I have grown calmer; I have stopped being angry with life because it does
not give what it cannot give." [-- Aleksandr Herzen]
"Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand
with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and
justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give
thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last,
laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of
reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which
has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, which if a man lays
hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the
existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from
him who observes these things." [-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations]
"There could be no
justice, unless there were also injustice; no courage, unless there were
cowardice; no truth, unless there were falsehood." [--
Chrysippus]
"When we say that pleasure is the goal, we mean ... being neither pained in the
body nor troubled in the soul ... it is not possible to live pleasurably without
living sensibly and nobly and justly. A just man is least troubled but an unjust
man is loaded with troubles ... the pleasant life is produced not by a string of
drinking-bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by
fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning."
[-- Epicurus]
"A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its
warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
[--Thucydides]
"This, however, I know – that if every nation were to bring all its evil deeds
to a given place in order to make an exchange with some other nation, when they
had all looked carefully at their neighbors’ faults, they would truly be glad to
carry their own back again." [-- Herodotus, Histories]
"Do not be led by Holy Scriptures, or by mere logic or inference, or by
appearances, or by the authority of religious teachers. But when you realize
that something is unwholesome and bad for you, give it up. And when you realize
that something is wholesome and good for you, do it." [--The Buddha]
