Quotes about nothing
page 4

“Like water leaking through a dam," said Piper.
"Yeah," smiled Percy. "We've got a dam hole."
"What?" Piper asked.
"Nothing," he said. "Inside joke.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Smile, Water

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Variant: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Leadership

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Gonzo

Fate, Support

“What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Personality

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

Time

“There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

“There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Source: The Complete Poems

Knowledge, Heart

“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Variant: Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

Happiness, Health, Memory, Deep

“War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

Variant: War Is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means
Source: On War (1832), Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 24, in the Princeton University Press translation (1976)
Variant translation: War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.
Context: War Is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means
We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.

War

“You are -- your life, and nothing else.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

Source: No Exit

Life, Hurtful, Relationship, Cute

“Being brokenhearted is like having broken ribs. On the outside it looks like nothing's wrong, but every breath hurts.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy

Hurt, Hurtful

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless

Variant: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Source: Mostly Harmless

Law, Travel, Light, Speed

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Failure, Teachers, Dead

“My favorite comedy is comedy where nothing is achieved and there is no point.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

“Nothing left to do but smile.”

Jerry Garcia (1942–1995) American musician and member of the Grateful Dead

Source: The Wisdom of Jerry Garcia

Smile

“And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again.

The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Food, Feeling, Change

“I loved my friend
He went away from me
There's nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Love

“Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect”

George Sand Indiana

Source: Indiana

Selfishness

“Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone… Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

Source: Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

People, Way, Learning

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

World

“Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything… Nothing happens without a reason… Nothing is impossible…(Page 180).”

Rosamunde Pilcher (1924–2019) British novelist

Way

“For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Source: The Faerie Queene

“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”

Patti Smith M Train

Source: M Train

Love

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Quoted by Alvin Redman in The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde http://books.google.com/books?id=qUjQAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Keep+love+in+your+heart+a+life+without+it+is+like+a+sunless+garden+when+the+flowers+are+dead+the+consciousness+of+loving+and+being+loved+brings+a+warmth+and+richness+to+life+that+nothing+else+can+bring%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage (1952)

Love, Life, Flowers, Heart

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Source: Duino Elegies (1922)
Context: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Beauty, Angels

“Nothing lasts forever.”

Sidney Sheldon (1917–2007) American writer

“The earth was all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.”

William Wordsworth book The Prelude

Source: The Prelude

Way, Heart

“Nothing comes ahead of its time, and nothing ever happened that didn't need to happen.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Time

“A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

World, Reality

“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

Way, Motivational, Deep, Success

“The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore—except his God.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

God, Fear, Feeling, Suffering

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Study, Memory

“Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated (1894)

Education, Time

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Friendship, Relationship, For Friend, For Bestfriend

“When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.”

Octavia E. Butler Fledgling

Source: Fledgling

Rage

“How strange! This bed on which I shall lie has been slept on by more than one dying man, but today it does not repel me! Who knows what corpses have lain on it and for how long? But is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse too knows nothing of its father, mother or sisters or Titus. Nor has a corpse a sweetheart. A corpse, too, is pale, like me. A corpse is cold, just as I am cold and indifferent to everything. A corpse has ceased to live, and I too have had enough of life…. Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!… Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man's finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the exact opposite of his best deed. It is therefore right of me to be angry that I was ever born into this world! Why was I not prevented from remaining in a world where I am utterly useless? What good can my existence bring to anyone? … But wait, wait! What's this? Tears? How long it is since they flowed! How is this, seeing that an arid melancholy has held me for so long in its grip? How good it feels - and sorrowful. Sad but kindly tears! What a strange emotion! Sad but blessed. It is not good for one to be sad, and yet how pleasant it is - a strange state…”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

Stuttgart. After 8th September 1831.
Source: "Selected Correspondence Of Fryderyk Chopin"; http://archive.org/stream/selectedcorrespo002644mbp/selectedcorrespo002644mbp_djvu.txt

Life, Children, People, Lie

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Two, Ch. 4
On the Road (1957)

Star, Night

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Tyranny of the Status Quo, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1980) p. 115

“Dusk falls. There is nothing gentle
about the sky.”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book The Social Contract

Source: The Social Contract

Men, Truth, Law

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Source: The Merchant of Venice

“If you are patient… and wait long enough… Nothing will happen”

Jim Davis (1945) American cartoonist and creator of Garfield

Waiting

“The american dream wasn't meant for me, cause lady liberty's a hypocrite she lied to me, promised me freedom, education, and equality never gave me nothing but slavery but now look at how dangerous you made me callin me a mad man because im strong and bold.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Education, Dreams, Freedom, Strong

“I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good Friends”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Happiness, Soul

“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.”

Galileo Galilei book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Loose paraphrase of Salviati on Day 3 http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/dialogue3.html: "For when the sun draws up some vapors here, or warms a plant there, it draws these and warms this as if it had nothing else to do. Even in ripening a bunch of grapes, or perhaps just a single grape, it applies itself so effectively that it could not do more even if the goal of all its affairs were just the ripening of this one grape." <br class="br">Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)

Universe, Sun, Dependency, Beauty

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Peace, Peaceful

“Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.”

Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

People

“Words are beautiful but restricted. They're very masculine, with a compact frame. But voice is over the dark, the place where there's nothing to hang on: it comes from a part of yourself that simply knows, expresses itself, and is.”

Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter

Beauty, Parting

“The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and Out in Paris and London

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Hate, Books

“All the passages in the Holy Scriptures that mention assistance are they that do away with "free-will", and these are countless…For grace is needed, and the help of grace is given, because "free-will" can do nothing.”

Martin Luther book On the Bondage of the Will

Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 270

Help

“…racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate in man. It is the product of ideologies. But even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed, it would not render social cooperation futile and would not invalidate Ricardo's theory of association. Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.”

Ludwig von Mises book Human Action

Part 2, VIII.84
Human Action (1949)

Love, Men, People, Peace

“When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you to trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing — then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

41e–42a
Plato, Apology

Justice, Thinking

“There is nothing exempt from the peril of mutation.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: The Cabinet Council (published 1658), Chapter 24

“When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/gsens10.txt), preface <br class="br">Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.

Men, Truth, Sense

“I'm standing on the bridge; I'm waiting in the dark. I thought that you'd be here by now. There's nothing but the rain, no footsteps on the ground. I'm listening, but there's no sound. Isn't anyone trying to find me? Won't somebody come take me home?”

Avril Lavigne (1984) Canadian singer-songwriter and actress

"I'm With You"
Let Go (2002)

Home, Waiting

“When you are connected to your destiny, nothing and nothing can stop you.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On how to stay focused - "The Secret Of My Peace In The Storm - TB Joshua" http://www.nigerianmonitor.com/the-secret-of-my-peace-in-the-storm-t-b-joshua/ Nigerian Monitor (October 27 2014) <br class="br">Variant: “When you are connected to your destiny, nothing and nothing can stop you.”

“The gnani is afraid of nothing. But he pities the man who is afraid. After all, to be born, to live and to die is natural. To be afraid is not. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Courage
Source: I am That, P.183.

Nature

“I was born under a lucky star, and I have nothing whatsoever to regret. I wouldn’t change a thing about my life.”

Richard Branson (1950) English business magnate, investor and philanthropist

In his interview with Nina Myskow for Saga magazine, July 2007

Life, Star, Change

“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 3

Money, God, World, Swine

“You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone."
"What then is a Master for?"
"To make you see the uselessness of having one.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Blindness
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

Learning

“When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

Appearance

“I am Bhole Baba (Simple Father). I am nobody and nothing. I am only like a mirror in which you can see yourself. I am like a fire. Don’t keep too far away or you will not get warmth. But don’t get too near or you may burn yourself. Learn the right distance. My name is Maha Prabhuji”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

The Great God
About Himself
Source: Gaura Devi. (1990). Babaji’s Teachings. P.7.

God, Learning

“I'm telling you
On what I feel
Gonna catch your mind
Dont shoot to kill
Well, they say the sky's the limit,
And to me that's really true,
But, my friend you have seen nothing,
Just wait 'til I get through.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Bad (1987)

Feeling, Waiting

“Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

The Art of Peace (1992)

Peaceful

“Lastly, we must also know what Baptism signifies, and why God has ordained just such external sign and ceremony for the Sacrament by which we are first received into the Christian Church. But the act or ceremony is this, that we are sunk under the water, which passes over us, and afterwards are drawn out again. These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man, both of which must take place in us all our lives, so that a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued.”

Martin Luther Luther's Large Catechism

"On Infant Baptism," Large Catechism (1529)

Life, Death, God, Water

“In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii
Music

“My social conscience is fairly limited in a lot of ways; there's not much I'm angry about that doesn't affect me quite directly. But the prison system- not particularly capital punishment- but the penal system as it is, and the whole apparatus of judgement, people deciding on other people's fates… that does irritate, and upset me quite a lot. What angers me about the system goes beyond the unreliability of "proof"… it's that the way criminals are dealt with has nothing to do with rehabilitation and readjusting people who've stepped outside society's norms. The same goes for mental institutions and so forth. But it's also the very idea of someone being judged "criminal" or "insane" because they're unable to fit into what a corrupt society considers "social" or "sociable."”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Politics, society and humanity

Fate, People, Way, Idea

“In the name of Indian national life, in the name of religion, I appeal to all in each of the two countries who hold position…let them begin each in their own community to work untiringly towards this end: boldly to repudiate feelings of hatred and intolerance, actively to condemn and suppress acts of violence and aggression, earnestly to strive to exorcise suspicions…I appeal in the name of national life because communal tension is eating into it as a canker…I appeal in the name of religion because I can appeal to nothing nobler, and because religion is the language of the soul, and it is a change of soul that India needs today.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Speech as Viceroy of India (1926), quoted in Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), pp. 223-234
Viceroy of India

Life, Religion, Feeling, Soul

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men, Truth, World, Faith

“Nothing is ugly as long as it is alive.”

Coco Chanel (1883–1971) French fashion designer

As quoted in Coco Chanel : Her Life, Her Secrets (1971) by Marcel Haedrich

“The city, that monster with a hundred mouths and a thousand ears, a monster that knows nothing but says everything, had written me off.”

Jean-Dominique Bauby book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death), trans. Jeremy Leggatt (Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0-375-70121-4), p. 82

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment (1866)

“This is a mans world.
This is a mans world.
But it would be nothing, nothing
Without a women or a girl.”

James Brown (1933–2006) American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist

It's a Man's Man's Man's World, written with Betty Jean Newsome, from It's a Man's Man's Man's World (1966)
Song lyrics

Women, World, Girl

“Nothing is so often and so irrevocably missed as the opportunity which crops up daily.”

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) Austrian writer

Nichts wird so oft unwiederbringlich versäumt wie eine Gelegenheit, die sich täglich bietet.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 21.

“I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 40
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Considero a vida uma estalagem onde tenho que me demorar até que chegue a diligência do abismo. Não sei onde ela me levará, porque não sei nada.

Life, Thinking

“Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposite that arise in human conduct.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

Life, Search

“"If God is everything and everywhere, then what purpose does the word serve? If it explains everything, then it explains nothing. But if it describes something important, then it should be observable by everyone, examined, and shared with other people" (Ch 8., pp.213).”

Greg Graffin (1964) American musician

Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God with Steve Olson (2010)

God, People

“I've found a place that would amaze you. People used to live there, but now it's all overgrown and no one goes there. Absolutely no one — only me… Just a little house and a garden. And two dogs. If you could see how they licked my hands, and their puppies — oh, Primus, there's probably nothing more beautiful! You take them on your lap and cuddle them, and just sit there until sundown not thinking about anything and not worrying about anything. Then when you get up you feel as though you've done a hundred times more than a lot of work. Really, I'm not good for much of anything. Everyone says I'm not cut out for any kind of work. I don't know what I'm good for.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

People, Beauty, Dogs, Feeling

“…nothing is stronger than true reality.”

Melissus of Samos (-470–-430 BC) Eleatic philosopher

Fragments of Melissus's On Nature, Fragment 8

Reality

“Parents always live a less pure life than their children, because they condone everything they do. The ability to condone everything in oneself but practically nothing in one's children is the boon that "experience" bestows on humanity. What parents call experience is really nothing but attempts, successful to the point of sheer cynicism, to belie everything which they found pure, true and right when they were young. They themselves don't notice the awful cynicism behind this incessant talk of "experience" being the highest aim in life: they only notice "inexperience" in their children, that is, the form of inexperience called purity and integrity, and then they get annoyed.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 135

Life, Children, Parent, Success

“I did, however, pass by one young girl, and she was like a goddess who came down from heaven. She was walking alone, in her bathing suit, with her luscious blonde hair blowing in the wind. I couldn’t help but slyly admire her beauty as we passed by each other. I was scared. I was scared that she might view me as nothing but an inferior insect who’s presence ruins her atmosphere. Her beauty was intoxicating! And then, just as we passed each other, she actually looked at me. She looked at me and smiled. Most girls never even deigned to look at me, and this one actually looked at me and smiled. I had never felt so euphoric in my life. One smile. One smile was all it took to brighten my entire day. The power that beautiful women have is unbelievable. They can temporarily turn a desperate boy’s whole world around just by smiling.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 19, Longing

Life, Women, World, Smile

“There is no doubt a difference in the right hon. gentleman's demeanour as leader of the Opposition and as Minister of the Crown. But that's the old story; you must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. 'Tis very true that the right hon. gentleman's conduct is different. I remember him making his protection speeches. They were the best speeches I ever heard. It was a great thing to hear the right hon. gentleman say: "I would rather be the leader of the gentlemen of England than possess the confidence of Sovereigns". That was a grand thing. We don't hear much of "the gentlemen of England" now. But what of that? They have the pleasures of memory—the charms of reminiscence. They were his first love, and, though he may not kneel to them now as in the hour of passion, still they can recall the past; and nothing is more useless or unwise than these scenes of crimination and reproach, for we know that in all these cases, when the beloved object has ceased to charm, it is in vain to appeal to the feelings. You know that this is true. Every man almost has gone through it. My hon. gentleman does what he can to keep them quiet; he sometimes takes refuge in arrogant silence, and sometimes he treats them with haughty frigidity; and if they knew anything of human nature they would take the hint and shut their mouths. But they won't. And what then happens? What happens under all such circumstances? The right hon. gentleman, being compelled to interfere, sends down his valet, who says in the genteelest manner: "We can have no whining here". And that, sir, is exactly the case of the great agricultural interest—that beauty which everybody wooed and one deluded. There is a fatality in such charms, and we now seem to approach the catastrophe of her career. Protection appears to be in about the same condition that Protestantism was in 1828. The country will draw its moral. For my part, if we are to have free trade, I, who honour genius, prefer that such measures should be proposed by the hon. member for Stockport than by one who through skilful Parliamentary manoeuvres has tampered with the generous confidence of a great people and a great party. For myself, I care not what may be the result. Dissolve, if you please, the Parliament you have betrayed. For me there remains this at least—the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/mar/17/agricultural-interest in the House of Commons (17 March 1845). <br class="br">1840s

Love, People, Pleasure, Beauty

“When you examine your conscience (attention to what I am going to tell you) do not go too far; look at it as we look at the seashore from the top of the Alps or the Pyrenees, lightly, without going into details. If you do not see anything clearly and certainly wrong, go ahead and be at peace with your God. Mind this, I repeat, and do tell me how you are faring, because the devil could trick you and do you serious hard with his false doctrine and suggestions. This union produces peace of mind; then search for peace. Let nothing disturb you, be it good or bad.”

Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest

Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)

God, Peace, Search, Falseness

“Ηe knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Alternate translation: I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

II.32. Original Greek: εἰδέναι μὲν μηδὲν πλὴν αὐτὸ τοῦτο [εἰδέναι].
Diogenes Laertius