Micko
@Micko, member from June 4, 2020
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.”
Statements to New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh, as quoted in Salinger : A Biography (2000) by Paul Alexander; also in If You Really Want to Hear About It : Writers on J.D. Salinger and His Work (2006) by Catherine Crawford.
Context: There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. … It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. … I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. … I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
Source: Franny and Zooey
As quoted in 101 People You Won't Meet in Heaven: The Twisted Achievements of the Most Brutal and Sadistic Individuals the World Has Ever Known (2007) by Michael Powell, p. 148
“The real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies.”
Interview track from Charles Manson Sings (2006)
“I was so smart when I was a kid that I learnt that I was dumb fast.”
Source: Interview on the album All the Way Alive (2003)
Quote in a letter to , September 1879; as cited in The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, pp. 202-203; also partly cited in: Jane Kinsman, Michael Pantazzi, National Gallery of Australia. Degas: the uncontested master, National Gallery of Australia, 7 apr. 2009. p. 25
1870 - 1890
Context: I am absolutely sickened with and demoralized by this life, I've been leading for so long. When you get to my age, there is nothing more to look forward to. Unhappy we are, unhappy we'll stay. Each day brings its tribulations and each day difficulties arise... So I'm giving up the struggle once and for all, abandoning all hope of success... I hear my friends are preparing another exhibition this year [the Impressionists, in Paris, 1880] but I'm ruling out the possibility of participating in it, as I just don't have anything worth showing.
“the more I live, the more I regret how little i know”
“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.”
“I want to paint the way a bird sings.”
Variant: I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Source: Monet By Himself
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
Meistens belehrt uns erst der Verlust über den Wert der Dinge.
Source: Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
Though this statement and a few other variants of it have been widely attributed to Herman Melville, it is actually a paraphrase of one found in a sermon of Henry Melvill, "Partaking in Other Men's Sins", St. Margaret's Church, Lothbury, England (12 June 1855), printed in Golden Lectures (1855) :
: There is not one of you whose actions do not operate on the actions of others—operate, we mean, in the way of example. He would be insignificant who could only destroy his own soul; but you are all, alas! of importance enough to help also to destroy the souls of others. ...Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.
Misattributed
“Like it or not, your existence is grounded in faith.”
Other
Der eitle, schwache Mensch sieht in Jedem einen Richter, der stolze, starke hat keinen Richter als sich selbst.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 34.
“Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.”
Misattributed
First recorded appearance: Germaine de Staël's On Germany (1813). ". . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane." There are several other pre-Nietzsche examples, indicating that the phrase was widespread in the nineteenth-century; it was referred to in 1927 as an "old proverb".