Some wisdom from great writers, and more seldom from just regular people – because you never know where wisdom comes from, just like love a good heart or a great idea – I started to collect since the beginning of this blog and which I am displaying here in a totally random order 🙂
“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
John Steinbeck
“the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth”
J.P. Sartre
“It is through the moments of pain that we find out who we are, but above all we discover who we want to be.”
PB
“To believe something really is just another choice, one that is supposed to make us feel better.”
PB
“Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive”
Gloria Gaynor
“Manuscripts don’t burn”
Professor Woland
“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.”
José Saramago, in Caim
“Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.”
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
Albert Camus
“Always look for the best in people. Expect the worst. But look for the best”
Brad Pitt, on the occasion of his Oscar-winning speech
“Your real self lies not deep within you but high above you”
Fredrick Nietzsche
“But I always thought you’d come back
Tell me, all you found was
Heartbreak and misery
It’s hard for me to say
I’m jealous of the way
You’re happy without me”
Labirinth
“If we observe only what we understand we end up existing only in what we understand”
Sandro Veronesi in XY
“People think toute cette comedie is something serious, all their unquestionable intelligence notwithstanding. There lies the tragedy. Well, and they suffer, of course, but … all the same they live, they live in reality, not in fantasy; for suffering is also life.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of men.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“You are not Dostoevsky,’ said the woman…
‘You never can tell…’ he answered.
‘Dostoevsky is dead,’ the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
‘I protest!’ he said with heat, ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!”
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your god do if
evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You’re stupid.”
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
“A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself… or just as mad.”
Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“It is only through the narrowness of our writing which the immensity of what we don’t write becomes readable”
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller
“It’s only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don’t you think you’d have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?”
Larissa Fyodorovna, Dr Zhivago
“What is truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or as if it had dropped out of the sky”
“The fabulous is never anything but the commonplace touched by the hand of genius”
Yury Zhivago
“By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding”
Jullian Baggini – from an interesting article in the Guardian long read series
“Pure attention without judgment is not only the highest form of human intelligence, but also the expression of love”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever”
Mahatma Ghandi
“Iqbal was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India”
The White Tiger of Bangalore
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”
Stephen Hawking
“Our desperation is the engine of our geniality”
F. S.
“He had to know the truth, despite how much pain it entailed. Only knowing the truth makes human beings stronger.”
In Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
“Life is not a thing, nor the state of a thing, but a continuous movement and change”
S. Radhakrishnan
“To understand everything is to forgive everything”
Madame de Staèl
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god“
J.L. Borges
“Loneliness is not living alone, loneliness is the inability to keep company to someone or something within us. Loneliness is not a tree that stands alone in the middle of a plain, but the distance between the deep sap and the bark, between the leaves and the roots.”
José Saramago
“Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude when waiting“
Unknown
