Stronger than pain quotes (page 223) | Quotes of famous people

“The Beatles may be more popular than Jesus but heavy cats like Chairman Mao, Uncle Ho, and beautiful long-haired Che Guevara are more popular than The Beatles.”

Abbie Hoffman book Woodstock Nation

Down on Me and Janis Joplin
Woodstock Nation (1969)

“Only it was much, much worse than that. In fact, words alone cannot adduce how much worse it was than that. September 11 was an attack on words: we felt a general deficit.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"The world: an explanation" in The Daily Telegraph (8 March 2003) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/custom?q=cache:hZVARej7mn0J:www.martinamisweb.com/documents/world_explanation.doc&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=1&ie=UTF-8&client=pub-4015880282924246
Context: What happened on September 11? On September 11 — what happened? Picture this: two upended matchboxes, knocked over by the sheer force of paper-darts.
Only it was much, much worse than that. In fact, words alone cannot adduce how much worse it was than that. September 11 was an attack on words: we felt a general deficit. And with words destroyed, we had to make do, we had to bolster truth with colons and repetition: not only repetition: but repetition and: colons. This is what we adduce.

“One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

The New Yorker (3 July 1943); reprinted as "Democracy" in The Wild Flag (1946)
Context: We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on "The Meaning of Democracy." It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

“Creating art or something beautiful makes you a more fulfilled person than they
can ever be because they’re caught up in what they hate rather than what they
love.”

Andrew Biersack (1990) American singer-songwriter

“A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness: from the moment”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Moon Landing (1969)

“They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 38 (p. 420)

“Proposition 13. The straight line subtending the portion intercepted within the earth's shadow of the circumference of the circle in which the extremities of the diameter of the circle dividing the dark and the bright portions in the moon move is less than double of the diameter of the moon, but has to it a ratio greater than that which 88 has to 45; and it is less than 1/9th part of the diameter of the sun, but has to it a ratio greater than that which 22 has to 225. But it has to the straight line drawn from the centre of the sun at right angles to the axis and meeting the sides of the cone a ratio greater than that which 979 has to 10125.”

Aristarchus of Samos ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician

p, 125
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (c. 250 BC)

“When I'm drinking my Bonaparte shandy
eating more than enough apple pies
will I glance at my screen
and see real human beings
starve to death right in front of my eyes?
Nothing old, nothing new, nothing ventured,
nothing gained, nothing stillborn or lost,
nothing further than proof, nothing wilder than youth,
nothing older than time, nothing sweeter than wine,
nothing physically recklessly hopelessly blind,
nothing I couldn't say
Nothing. Why? 'Cos today nothing rhymed”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"Nothing Rhymed" (song)
Gilbert O'Sullivan. A live performance. On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtoefxZGR6U
Gilbert O'Sullivan. A performance with orchestra, c.2017. On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SWTPDPriA
Gilbert O'Sullivan. Observations about "Nothing Rhymed", fifty years on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BlxtcH39Q (On YouTube)
(+ A cover version by Franklin Brown on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6kuZyk5WJ8
(+ A cover version by Colleen Coughlan on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcqndbjOPTs
(+ A cover version by Conor McCauley on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nAb0-7J9d4
(+ A cover version by The Ocelots on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCDFiRaRA0
(+ Guitar instrumental by Phil McGarrick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmzFaUC1rDI
Song lyrics
Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Nothing Rhymed" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGE6gzkMAfw (song on YouTube)

“Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. … In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain."”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.
Part III, Ch. VIII, 4, pp. 213 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/213/mode/2up-214
First line often paraphrased as: Compassion is the basis of all morality.
On the Basis of Morality (1840)

“The Chinese and their government are wedded to a different conception of society and polity: community-based rather than individualist, state-centric rather than liberal, authoritarian rather than democratic. China has 2,000 years of history as a distinct civilization from which to draw strength. It will not simply fold under Western values and institutions.”

Dani Rodrik (1957) Turkish Economist

Will China Rule the World? http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rodrik39

“Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

La critique souvent n'est pas une science; c'est un métier, où il faut plus de santé que d'esprit, plus de travail que de capacité, plus d'habitude que de génie. Si elle vient d'un homme qui ait moins de discernement que de lecture, et qu'elle s'exerce sur de certains chapitres, elle corrompt et les lecteurs et l'écrivain.
Aphorism 63
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit

“As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I’ve read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Nic Pizzolatto, as quoted by Michael Calia (2014) " Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’ http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/02/writer-nic-pizzolatto-on-thomas-ligotti-and-the-weird-secrets-of-true-detective/", Speakeasy blog on the Wall Street Journal