“I'd rather live in the gutter embracing reality than live like a king embracing unreality.”
Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/message/104999
Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
“I'd rather live in the gutter embracing reality than live like a king embracing unreality.”
Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/message/104999
Octave Mirbeau book The Torture Garden
Variant: “It isn’t dying that’s sad. It’s living when you’re not happy.”
Source: Le Jardin des supplices
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer
The benign catastrophist (2003)
“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 15
Context: Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.