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“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
“On fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs. ”
“Justice is love distributed.”
“The exceptions, naturally, have a very unhappy childhood and youth; for to be essentially reflective at an age which is naturally immediate, is the depths of melancholy. But they are recompensed; for most people do not succeed in becoming spirit, and all the fortunate years of their immediateness are, where spirit is concerned, a loss, and therefore they never attain to spirit. But the unhappy childhood and youth of the exception is transfigured into spirit.”
“Quand on ne sait pas à quel port il faut tendre, on n’a jamais le bon vent.”
“Let us learn to dream, then perhaps we shall find the truth.”
“That’s not wisdom, that’s just words.”
“Time is an eternity that stammers.”
“En toute espèce de biens, posséder est peu de chose; c’est jouir qui rend heureux.”
““So the world is a sickness of God?”
“If you are perfect, you cannot fail to emanate yourself; if you emanate yourself, you become sick.””
“The Gypsies are in truth a touchstone to the personality of a man.”
“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”
“We will never know everything about the world - we will only know nothing in detail.”
“Il n’existe que deux choses infinies - l’univers et la bêtise humaine… mais pour l’univers, je n’ai pas de certitude absolu.”
“Mon bic pleure.”
“Never tell anyone what you propose to do until you’ve done it.”
“I now saw that I had, strangely, taken both Bardia’s explanation and the Fox’s (each while it lasted) for certain truth. Yet one must be false. And I could not find out which, for each was well rooted in its own soil… But I could not find out whether the doctrines of Glome or the wisdom of Greece were right. I was the child of Glome and the pupil of the Fox; I saw that for years my life had been lived in two halves, never fitted together.”
“Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of a first-class mind was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the head at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
“…people like us with a dimension too many…”
“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”
“You’ll never get to heaven if you’re scared of getting high.”
“How much more in touch could I be? I’m alive now.”
“To eat the food of a foreign land binds you to that place. Such bonds are not easily broken.”
“For human beings to be in balance, their external landscape must match their internal one.”
“Coffee goes great with sudden death”
“And yet these discoveries… made him all the more uneasy - as is the way of melancholic spirits, to whom every sign of good fortune forebodes dire consequences.”
“It is always now... The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now”
“Having learned early to suffer, we suffer not at all.”
“Poets… know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart can run to many editions.”
“Liberty does not mean licence to do evil. It means freedom from restraint to do good.”
“I make so many mistakes. But then just think of all the mistakes I don’t make.”
“There are many Graces, Gilles, more than you know, more than you will ever know… Grace has not changed. She cannot change. What you have seen is one of the ghosts she keeps inside her; the Grace she might have been.”
“Have you never been so indescribably distressed, that the power of sorrow over your whole being was almost like the powers of nature: then you have experienced what it means to be dumb, experienced the feeling of being unable, even though your life were at stake, to express the agony that rocked deep within you, and selfish of itself made you dumb - in order that you might not rid yourself of it. For that is how infinite sorrow is egotistical; it makes a man dumb in order to keep him in its power.”
“There is a melancholy in everything in my life, but then again an indescribable happiness.”
“On dit qu’il n’est fols que saiges.”
“My life began without immediateness, with a terrible melancholy, in its earliest youth deranged in its very deepest foundations, a melancholy which threw me for a time into sin and debauchery and yet (humanly speaking) almost more insane than guilty.”
“Equating death with sleep stripped it of the honour of the absolute.”
“Ayez donc le cœur si plein, que la vengeance ne peut y trouver place.”
“You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity. however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough to be a joke.”
“What does love feel like? Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”
“One can be hated just as much for good deeds as for evil ones.”
“Of course, death is but another way to see the world.”
“Absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine… Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself… Truth is lived, not taught.”
“Only those who have God by their side need be afraid”
“God... is a space that is not, in which you and I are the same thing.”
“A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without one, you’ll never be enough with one.”
“In the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, and it is the most powerful move of all.”
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
“A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.”
“That’s what’s in Grace’s eyes, Mr. Cohen. It’s not sex. It’s resignation.”
“No one can say much about the brilliant, they will be miserable anyway.”
“I was dropped on my head and was a quadriplegic for a couple of minutes. You have bad days at the office.”
“...but I can’t say that she died. She only effaced herself a trifle more than usual, and when I looked round she was no longer there.”
“Once we think we know the future, we may forget that we have yet to play a significant role in making it.”
“Those who perform magic… finally are persuaded that, even if they don’t believe in the devil, the devil surely believes in them.”
“The writing of history… remains literature. History’s third dimension is always fiction.”
“A prime minister truly eager to listen would tour the country aboard the humble buses that pick up and set down in inconsequential villages as they trundle their way into town.”
“Men are tormented, not by things themselves, but by what they think about them.”
“They talk like TV channels I don’t watch.”
“He who wants to study the book of nature must wander with his feet over its leaves.”
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”
“Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then.”
“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”