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A Quote Collection, Pt. 2 [Something Interesting #77]

  • Writer: A.B.
    A.B.
  • 13 hours ago
  • 6 min read

I've traditionally tried to give larger quotes their own posts, but I have too large a back-catalog of shorter ones and I'm just tired of them sitting there, not doing anything useful. So you all can have them & use them as you wish! Probably just going to post them like this going forward, similar to how I do my backlogs of Instagram likes.


"Whatever I look at, I want it to be good - whether it's what you're wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what's going on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop."

 

"There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error."

"The real significance of our problem with time... is a crisis of meaning... The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychological. It is metaphysical. It is a question of the meaning of human life itself."

"Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don't love you or your work; for me that is what is valuable— not compliments."

 

"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week."

 

"All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride."

 

"If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light."

 

"Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future... The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received."

 

"Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another."

 

"Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think."

 

"The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don't. Statesmen don't. Priests don't. Union leaders don't. Only poets."

 

"The only politics I believe in is unconditional polite warfare: Anybody who needs should have their needs supplied— and politely. I'm a dissident author; the deadliest inertia is to conform with your times."

 

"The great men Thoreau, Goethe, Emerson, Tolstoy forever radiate a sharp sense of that profound requirement of an artist, to fully understand that consequences of what he creates are unimportant. Let the motive for action be in the action itself and not in the event. I know from my own experience that when I create with any degree of strength and beauty I have no thought of consequences. Anyone who creates for effect—to score a hit—does not know what he is missing!"

N.C. Wyeth (in a letter to son Andrew)

 

"Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie."

 

"A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you."

 

"Attention without feeling... is only a report."

"The more you write, the bigger the imagined world gets. And the other life stays on the chair, quiet, where the body is still."

 

"It is the writer's job, if he cannot write a masterpiece, at least to avoid writing junk."

 

“Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.”

William Shakespeare (written for Claudius in Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 3))

 

"Every sentence is an innovation."

 

"From tiny experiences we build cathedrals."

 

"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all."

 

"We should not be surprised that those who are today's oppressed could become tomorrow's oppressors. Even a freely-elected democratic government is still made up of frail, vulnerable human beings who may or may not succumb to the temptations of power."

 

"How you wait is who you are, and everything depends on your sense of an ending."

 

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

 

"It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen."

 

"While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them."

 

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the subject."

 

"The man who thinks the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life."

 

"Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen."

 

"All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn't that the evil thing wins - it never will - but that it doesn't die."

 

"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves."

 

"The fact that we are connected through space and time shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact."

 

"Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder."

 

"Magazines that refuse unsolicited manuscripts strike me as lazy, incurious, self-assured, and self-important."

 

"Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world."

 

"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

 

"I'm not going to be able to persuade everyone, but I will persuade some people, simply because I stand on the facts and the truth."

 

"The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me."

 

"Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair."

 

"If you don't like someone's story, you write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, you say what it is you don't like."

 

"The desire to fix another is an active avoidance of the neglected Self."

 

"Use a reader's leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel his time has been wasted."

 

"We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge' quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns."

 

"The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity... The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other."

"If man is to survive, he will learn to take a delight in the essential differences between cultures. To learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life' exciting variety, not something to fear."

"The concept that everything is on a spectrum, and that nothing is clearly defined, is just such a clear path to empathy."

"Honesty without kindness is cruel. Kindness without honesty is manipulation. Honesty with kindness is integrity."

Unknown

 

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

 

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

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