TO SEARCH ALL QUOTES, HIT CTRL+F AND TYPE A WORD
“Managers are used to having comprehensive plans… such magisterial plans, however, can lead to magical thinking, with managers confusing plan with reality, viewing the world as an extension of their will.”
“Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter is mass, and mass changes time and space.”
“You can’t have freedom without a little danger. You can’t have art without a lot of freedom.”
“Change is the essential process of all existence.”
“When he was at war, he knew it was the worst place he had ever been, the worst place he would ever be. Such an awareness did something to the mind, the emotions, the very spirit of a man… A child would smile, and he would see an eight-year-old facedown in a pool of muddy stinking water, the back of its head blown away. A bright bouquet of flowers, and he would see not only the bursting hearts and lingering trails of magnesium flares but the zip and crash of tracers, and in his ear would be the thump and rumble of mortar fire.”
“Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
“It has never been the custom of the wise to fling away their words in indifferent talk and conversation”
“Be desirous of hearing patiently the opinion of others, and consider and reflect carefully whether he who censures you has reason for his censure.”
“Someone once said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed.”
“Nothing that is is unimportant.”
“Traditional managers… present themselves as the superior of the subordinates… In reality, the subordinates may be superior to their “superior” in many respects… As a result, traditional managers are continuously involved in exaggerations and mystifications to preserve a facade of superiority.”
“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
“This is the appreciation for life. You can only feel it when you face death.”
“The beauty of the body is only skin-deep. If men could only see what is beneath the flesh, they would be nauseated just to look at women; all the feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humours, bile. Consider all that is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, in the stomach… And we who are repelled by the very thought of touching vomit or ordure with the tips of our fingers, how can we ever want to embrace a sack of excrement?”
“As a Byzantine commentator had noted, the Empire was not protected by ‘rivers, lagoons or parapets, but by fear’ - fear being ‘an obstacle that no man has surmounted once he is convinced that he is inferior.’”
“There’s something in me still, something hard and not necessarily good. I still feel it occasionally, a cold hard something, like a stone inside a clenched fist. I always had it, even in the old days, something mean and dogged and just clever enough to hang on for as long as it took to win.”
“Listen to the moaning of the pine, at whose root thy hut is fastened.”
“When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.”
“There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monastic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two.”
“Keeping your mind open in the face of uncertainty is the single most powerful secret of unleashing your creative potential.”
“One must go on fighting - it is the only honorable thing to do.”
“Her mother’s opinion was like the pyramids in relation to Cairo - huge, unyielding and no matter where you stood, you could still feel their presence, even if you couldn’t see them.”
“The good news is that you may have created my past and screwed up my present but you have no control over my future. You don’t know me at all.”
“Survival is dependent upon the manipulation of fear into something you can use.”
“You have to break the law before you can serve it properly.”
“Telling your secret to a witch is like whispering to a wall.”
““Those tattoos are amazing. Do they mean something?”
”They mean everything.””
“Somebody does need to do something. And maybe this time ‘somebody’ doesn’t mean ‘somebody else.’”
“I would remind you, though, that the word ‘decide’ is descended from older words meaning ‘to kill’; options and opportunities die when decisions are made. Be careful what you kill.”
“Logic is the cement of our civilisation with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide.”
“In this universe of occult services the boundaries between Good and Bad are extremely subtle, and what is Good for one person is Bad for others. Sometimes, even in ancient times, the difference between an angel and a witch was simply a question of age and physical charm.”
“My mistake was thinking children were like trees. Prune them back and they’ll grow sweeter. Not true. Not true. When Y died I made them grow up too fast. I didn’t want them to be children. Now they’re harder than me. Like animals. My fault. I made them that way.”
“London is the place for strange rencounters.”
“A lover of nooks and retired corners, I was as a child in the habit of fleeing from society.”
“The idea that anyone should pursue his personal economic ends to the limit, provided that he kept within the law, was foreign to the medieval mind, which regarded the alleviation of poverty as a duty, and the private accumulation of wealth as a danger to the soul.”
“Science is always indispensable but never sufficient.”
“Nothing’s painful after you’ve lost a child. It’s merely layers of numbness.”
“...to be brought up by ‘parents’, that is, to be warped and bungled to the greatest extent humanly possible.”
“Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.”
“Logic is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.”
“The reward you get for digging holes is a bigger shovel.”
“Challenge your preconceptions, or they will challenge you. ”
“Il y a deux histoires: l’histoire officielle, menteuse, et l’histoire secrète, où sont les véritables causes des évènements.”
“It is easier to apply epithets of opprobrium to people than to make yourself acquainted with their history and position.”
“When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all.”
“You are the captain of your own ship, but you can’t control the weather.”
“That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes; why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”
“Allow me to share one simple and very frightening truth with you: the real enemy is someone who knows you. And the better they know you, the closer they are to you, the greater is their capacity to do harm… the person who shares a part of your life, who lives with you and knows all your habits and has a keen insight into what you value most in all the world - this is the person to fear.”
“What was it people said about hell? Religion was for people who were afraid of hell and spirituality was for people who’d already been there.”
“Look at you, it said: a wastrel, hardly any friends, estranged from your mother, cut off from your father, no man, no children, a nomad who doesn’t even know what country to call home, an orphan in all but name.”
“Without ash to rise from, the phoenix would just be a bird getting up.”
“A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
“In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.”
“Loss of life is to be mourned, but only if the life was wasted.”