“Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
“To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.”
— Bertolt Brecht
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (via quotespile)
“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”
— Albert Camus, “Three Interviews”, Lyrical and Critical Essays
“There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
“I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (via quotespile)
There’s not, and entropy always wins.
“Once your faith persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life… anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”
— Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles
“None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.”
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.”
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
— James Baldwin