“How good and thoughtful he is; the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.”
Bram Stoker book Dracula
Variant: The world seems full of good men, even if there are monsters in it.
Source: Dracula
“It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”
— Leonard Cohen, book Beautiful Losers
Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
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Leonard Cohen169
Canadian poet and singer-songwriter 1934–2016Related quotes
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
God and Man
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality
David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor
McKenna interview (1992)
Context: Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower. People lived in towns and small farms where they knew everybody and people didn't move around so much so things were a little more peaceful. There were things that they were afraid of for sure, but now it's accelerated to where the anxiety level of the people is in the stratosphere. TV sped things up and caused people to hear way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people with more than they could handle, and drugs also had a lot to do with it. With drugs people can get so rich and whacked out and they've opened up a whole weird world. These things have created a modern kind of fear in America.
“The only monsters I have ever known were men.”
Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller
Source: The Storyteller
“Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.”
John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist
Act III, sc. i.
The Lover's Melancholy (1628)
Alex Kurtzman (1973) American television producer
Filmaker Alex Kurtzman on Resurrecting Universal's Classic Monsters and Building a Shared Uvinverse http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/12/05/the-mummy-filmmaker-alex-kurtzman-on-resurrecting-universals-classic-monsters-and-building-a-shared-universe (December 4, 2016)
“Good fortune is a god among men, and more than a god.”
Aeschylus The Libation Bearers
Variant translation: Success is man's god.
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), The Libation Bearers, line 59
“Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”
Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director
Source: The Monsters Of Hellboy II
Ovunque i mi sia, io sono Amore.
Ne'pastori non men, che ne gli heroi;
E la disagguaglianza de'soggetti,
Come à me piace, agguaglio.
Prologue
Aminta (1573)