Stronger than pain quotes (page 250) | Quotes of famous people

“FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT….”

Terry Pratchett book The Shepherd's Crown

Source: The Shepherd's Crown

“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: America

“There are times in
life when the question of knowing if one can think differently
than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting
at all.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure

“Anyone can write. Some people can write a bit better than others; they're called authors. Then there are some who can write better than authors; they're called artists.”

Walter Moers (1957) German comic creator and author

“That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine…”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King (2011)
Context: "Maybe it's not metaphysics. Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--... And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have pour in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what-- a hundred years? two hundred?-- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and that before maybe three of four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are... The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."

“There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Addicted to Addicts http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_sndgs01.html (Winter 1999).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“I whispered “I’m not,” even though I was. Not scared of him, but scared of everything I felt. Sometimes it was too much. What I felt for him was bigger than the world, than anything.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

“It is not national interests we are upholding — we claim that the interests of socialism, the interests of world socialism, rank higher than national interests, higher than the interests of the state. We are defenders of the socialist fatherland.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Address to the Party Central Committee (14 May 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 365-381.
1910s

“Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh,
When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee;
Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight,
Dawns the sweet consciousness, — I am with Thee.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Reported in James Freeman Clarke, Book of Worship for the Congregation and the Home (1852), p. 431.

“I started out by believing God for a newer car than the one I was driving. I started out believing God for a nicer apartment than I had. Then I moved up.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Jim Bakker, quoted in Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right by Michael Lienesch (UNC Press, 1993), p. 45
Misattributed

“It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

“The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.”

Franz Kafka book Parables and Paradoxes

"Paradise"
Parables and Paradoxes (1946)

“Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

" On the Spirit of Obligations http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/SpiritObligations.htm" (1824)
The Plain Speaker (1826)

“Children are liable to expect more from life than their parents, and faced with adversity their reaction is more violent. They go farther, much farther than their parents, and, thereafter, their parents are unable to protect them.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

P 104
The Search Warrant (2000)

“The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), V
Context: A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

“Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Context: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it — all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

“Forgive me, that was the soldier speaking. Now this is the man speaking again. And the man is more than the soldier. I can bear anything. Death is a more solemn thing than all the earthly trash.”

Emilio De Bono (1866–1944) Italian General

Quoted in "Mussolini: Twilight and Fall" - Page 129 - by Roman Dąbrowski - Italy - 1956

“Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Lotos-Eaters

Choric Song, st. 8
The Lotos-Eaters (1832)

“Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)

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