Quotes about everything
page 35

Donald J. Trump photo

“Sometimes I think that everything I see does not exist. Because everything I see is what I saw, and everything I saw does not exist.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

A veces creo que no existe todo lo que veo. Porque todo lo que veo es todo lo que vi. Y todo lo que vi no existe.
Voces (1943)

Arthur Schopenhauer photo
David Weber photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Elfriede Jelinek photo

“Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature.”

p 48
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

Jeff Koons photo

“My work will use everything that it can to communicate. It will use any trick; it'll do anything — absolutely anything — to communicate and to win the viewer over. Even the most unsophisticated people are not threatened by it; they aren't threatened that this is something they have no understanding of. They can look at it and they can participate with it. And also somebody who has been very highly educated in art and deals with more esoteric areas can also view it and find that the work is open as far as being something that wants to add more to our culture. The work wants to meet the needs of' the people. It tries to bring down all the barriers that block people From their culture. that shield and hide them. It tells them to embrace the moment instead of always feeling that they're being indulged by things that they do not participate in. It tells them to believe in something and to eject their will. The idea of St. John and baptism right now is that there are greater things to come. And it's about embracing guilt and shame and moving forward instead of letting this negative society always thwart us — always a more negative society, always more negative.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

Partly cited in: Linda Weintraub, Arthur Coleman Danto, Thomas McEvilley. Art on the edge and over: searching for art's meaning in contemporary society, 1970s-1990s. Art Insights, Inc., 1996. p. 201; And cited in Kristine Stiles, ‎Peter Howard Selz (1996). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. p. 381
"From Full Phantom Five," 1988

Will Eisner photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“But it never occurred to him to want to be a philosopher, or dedicate himself to Speculation; he was still too fickle for that. True, he was not drawn now to one thing and now to another – thinking was and remained his passion – but he still lacked the self-discipline required for acquiring a deeper coherence. Both the significant and the insignificant attracted him equally as points of departure for his pursuits; the result was not of great consequence – only the movements of thought as such interested him. Sometimes he noticed that he reached one and the same conclusion from quite different starting points, but this did not in any deeper sense engage his attention. His delight was always just to be pressing on; wherever he suspected a labyrinth, he had to find the way. Once he had started, nothing could bring him to a halt. If he found the going difficult and became tired of it before he ought, he would adopt a very simple remedy – he would shut himself up in his room, make everything as festive as possible, and then say loudly and clearly: I will do it. He had learned from his father that one can do what one wills, and his father’s life had not discredited this theory. Experiencing this had given Johannes indescribable pride; that there could be something one could not do when one willed it was unbearable to him. But his pride did not in the least indicate weakness of will, for when he had uttered these energetic words he was ready for anything; he then had a still higher goal – to penetrate the intricacies of the problem by force of will. This again was an adventure that inspired him. Indeed his life was in this way always adventurous. He needed no woods and wanderings for his adventures, but only what he possessed – a little room with one window.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus p. 22-23
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Thomas Love Peacock photo

“MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis.
MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason.
MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable.
SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made.
MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible.
MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding.
MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock.
MR. PANSCOPE. 'Sdeath, Sir, do you question my understanding?
MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate.
MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd.
MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd.
MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir!
MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient.
MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir?
MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument.
MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!”

Headlong Hall, chapter V (1816).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Skin in the Game (2018)

Shunryu Suzuki photo
Gay Talese photo
Dave Matthews photo

“That's the magic of this band: shooting from the hip. The lights have to follow our cues, because we're not going to follow their cues. We're not going to stick to a song the way it's supposed to be. Everything is up to us. That's music to me. That's American music. We're an American band.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Dave Matthews, Rolling Stone interview "The Boys of Summer" (June 16, 2005). Eliscu, Jenny (2005). "The Boys of Summer" http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/davematthewsband/articles/story/7371942/the_boys_of_summer Rolling Stone (accessed June 19. 2006)

Jerome David Salinger photo

“The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth.”

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)

Albert Camus photo
Báb photo
Dylan Moran photo
Jean Baudrillard photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Charles B. Rangel photo
Michelle Obama photo

“We cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)

“If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary.”

Michel Thomas (1914–2005) American linguist and language teacher

Speak German with Michel Thomas, Disc 5

Babe Ruth photo

“Pitchers—real pitchers— know that their job isn't so much to keep opposing batsmen from hitting as it is to make them hit it at someone. The trouble with most kid pitchers is that they forget there are eight other men on the team to help them. They just blunder ahead, putting everything they have on every pitch and trying to carry the weight of the whole game on their shoulders. The result is that they tire out and go bad along in the middle of the game, and then the wise old heads have to hurry out and rescue them. I've seen a lot of young fellows come up, and they all had the same trouble. Take Lefty Grove over at Philadelphia, for instance. There isn't a pitcher in the league who has more speed or stuff than Lefty. He can do things with a baseball that make you dizzy. But when he first came into the league he seemed to think that he had to strike out every batter as he came up. The result was he'd go along great for five or six innings, and them blow. And he's just now learning to conserve his strength. In other words, he's learning that a little exercise of the noodle will save a lot of wear and tear on his arm.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

"Chapter III," Babe Ruth's Own Book of Baseball (1928), pp. 32-33; reprinted as "Babe Ruth's Own Story — Chapter III: Pitching the Keynote of Defense; The Pitcher's Job; Why Young Hurlers Fail," https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=r0sbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=J0sEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6011%2C3899916 in The Pittsburgh Press (December 23, 1928), p. 52

Lloyd Kaufman photo
Chris Cornell photo
Pauline Hanson photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 38

Jeremy Rifkin photo
Trinny Woodall photo

“I felt so unbelievably ugly for years. It was hideous. It affected my selfworth, everything. It was the bane of my life from 13 to 29. I grew my hair long just so I could cover my face. I tried everything, saw everyone, had years of antibiotics and nothing helped. Then, when I was 29, I was at the end of my tether. I went on Accutane, which is very strong. Your sebaceous glands dry up, you can't exercise, and you have very dry lips. But it was a miracle and it worked.”

Trinny Woodall (1964) English fashion advisor and designer, television presenter and author

Regarding Woodall's acne condition; as quoted in "Acne, alcohol … and non-stop sex" by Lynda Lee-Potter in The Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=229872&in_page_id=1879 (6 September 2003)

Mike Huckabee photo
Victor Villaseñor photo

“It was from this day on that I began to notice a real difference between our vaqueros on the ranch from Mexico and the gringo cowboys. The American cowboys always seemed so ready to act rough and tough, wanting to “break” the horse, cow, or goat or anything else. Where, on the other hand, our vaqueros—who used the word “amanzar,” meaning to make “tame,” for dealing with horses—had a whole different attitude towards everything. To “break” a horse, for the cowboys, actually, really meant to take a green, untrained horse and rope him, knock him down, saddle him while he fought to get loose, then mount him as he got up on all four legs, and ride the living hell out of the horse until you tired him out, taught him who was boss, and “broke” his spirit. To “amanzar” a horse, on the other hand, was a whole other approach that took weeks of grooming, petting, and leading the green horse around in the afternoon with a couple of well-trained horses. Then, after about a month, you began to put a saddle on the horse and tie him up in shade in the afternoon for a couple of hours until, finally, the saddle felt like just a natural part of him. Then, and only then, did a person finally mount the horse, petting and sweet-talking him the whole time, and once more the green horse was taken on a walk between two well-trained horses.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Luise Rainer photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Berthe Morisot photo
Thomas Little Heath photo
Ellen Kushner photo
George Chakiris photo
Mikha'il Na'ima photo
John C. Wright photo

“You have reached that unfortunate age where you have all of life’s answers and you know everything more perfectly and more profoundly than your elders.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Fugitives of Chaos (2006), Chapter 1, “Interlude with Amelia” (p. 16)

Leo Ryan photo
David Allen photo

“It's hard to say no when you're not aware of everything you've said yes to.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

19 July 2011 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/93386722926276609
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Paul Cézanne photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Theodosius Dobzhansky photo
Rose Wilder Lane photo
Robert Spencer photo
Ben Carson photo

“I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they’re saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

As quoted in "Ben Carson: Big Bang A Fairy Tale, Theory Of Evolution Encouraged By The Devil" http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/ben-carson-big-bang-a-fairy-tale-theory-of-evolution-encoura#.scwEnmYlG, Buzzfeed News (September 22, 2015)

Theresa May photo
Eliezer Yudkowsky photo

“Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians (April 2011) http://lesswrong.com/lw/5c0/epistle_to_the_new_york_less_wrongians/

Nathan Leone photo
Glenn Beck photo
Ken Thompson photo

“It does everything Unix does only less reliably.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

In response to the question, "Can you sum up plan 9 in layman's terms?"
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)

John Calvin photo
Eliza Dushku photo
Milan Kundera photo
Antoni Tàpies photo
Francis Bacon photo
Ludwig Boltzmann photo
André Breton photo
Franz Marc photo

“The impure men and women who surrounded me (and particularly the men), did not arouse any of my real feelings; while the natural feeling for life possessed by animals set in vibration everything good in me.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

from the front of World War 1.
In a letter to his wife, April 1915; as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444
1915 - 1916

Randy Pausch photo
Charles Reis Felix photo

“Chance dictates everything.”

Charles Reis Felix (1923–2017) American writer

Page 176
Crossing the Sauer: a memoir of World War II (2002)

Sugar Ray Robinson photo

“Rhythm is everything in boxing. Every move you make starts with your heart, and that's in rhythm or you're in trouble.”

Sugar Ray Robinson (1921–1989) American boxer

Ray Robinson 'Sugar Ray Robinson with Dave Anderson' page 75

Manuel Rivera-Ortiz photo

“Out among the big things —
The heights that gleam afar —
A feller gets to wonder
What means each distant star;
He may not get an answer,
But somehow, every night
He feels, among the big things,
That everything’s all right.”

Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist

Out Among the Big Things, st. 3.
Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#outbk (1917)

Justin Trudeau photo
Robert Lanza photo

“Everything is a bit of darkness, even light itself.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Todo es un poco de oscuridad, hasta la misma luz.
Voces (1943)

Edith Stein photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Aron Ra photo

“I mean it; the Bible-god of western monotheism is just like that horrible kid. Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever? Religion doesn’t want to talk about life either. They hate practically everything that goes on in life. They want to talk about death and pretend that THAT is life. And those of us who know life, live life, and love life, they accuse of being dead already. Every aspect of their world-view is upside-down or backwards -as DogmaDebate brilliantly illustrated. What these religionists preach actually diminishes the very meaning of life. Humans tend to value most that which is rare and fleeting. Such is life. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it is. They’re claiming immortality for eternity, rendering the value of life infinitely worthless. They sell their imaginary after-life as if it is sooo much better than this period of discomfort we have to endure before we achieve paradise. Having to toil in this fallen, sin-corrupted, dead-and-damned world. They hate existence itself so much that they actually long for the end-of-days, and only seem to get happy when they think Armageddon is upon us.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

William Penn photo

“It were endless to dispute upon everything that is disputable.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

184
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

Stephen Crane photo
Guillaume Apollinaire photo

“I've made a song for the poorly loved
And songs for everything I grieved –
For unaccompanied slave and shark,
For queens who've gone into the dark.”

Moi qui sais des lais pour les reines
Les complaintes de mes années
Des hymnes d'esclave aux murènes
La romance du mal-aimé
Et des chansons pour les sirènes
"La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" (Song of the Poorly Loved), line 91; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 97.
Alcools (1912)

Bram van Velde photo

“I'm trying to see, when everything in this world conspires to prevent us from seeing.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Hồ Xuân Hương photo
Gerard Manley Hopkins photo
Walter Model photo

“Has everything been done to justify our actions in the light of history? What can there be left for a commander in defeat? In antiquity they took poison.”

Walter Model (1891–1945) German field marshal

To his chief of staff General Carl Wagener on 17 April 145, before dissolving Army Group B. Quoted in "Battle for the Ruhr" - Page 373 - by Derek S. Zumbro - 2006

Sören Kierkegaard photo
Caterina Davinio photo

“Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, mind is not the cause of the order in nature; mind is an example of the order in nature - something to be explained rather than the explanation for everything else.”

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 101

Henry Suso photo

“It is hidden for everything that is not God, except for those with whom he wants to share Himself.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Life of the Servant

Pierce Brown photo
Douglas Coupland photo
Adolf Hitler photo
Kent Hovind photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Basil of Caesarea photo

“Nothing withstands the influence of wealth. Everything submits to its tyranny, everything cowers at its dominion.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: Social Justice, To the Rich (c. 368), p. 51

Gertrude Stein photo
Frida Kahlo photo
Mikhail Baryshnikov photo

“You ask me what's happened in my life, why and how I did this and that. And I think and tell, but it's never true story, because everything is so much more complicated, and also I can't even remember how things happened. Whole process is boring. Also false, but mostly boring.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948) Soviet-American dancer, choreographer, and actor born in Letonia, Soviet Union

As quoted in "Profile: The Soloist" by Joan Acoccella, in The New Yorker (January 19, 1998); reprinted in Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker https://books.google.com/books?id=KDhjzXAjyUMC&pg=PA62 (2000), edited by David Remnick, p. 62.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
Phillip Guston photo
Lee Child photo