Favorite literature quotes

[Moser]

Sentences and even paragraphs welcome. any language, hopefully a translation too.

"I went down to the Piraeus today with Glaucon, son of Ariston..."-Plato's Republic

 

[paradoxparadigm7]

"A solid sense of self develops from confronting yourself, challenging yourself to do what's right, and earning your own self-respect."

 

[Cavalli]

I have two.

"Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”

"Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”

Both from Homer's "The Iliad"

 

[paradoxparadigm7]

I have two.

"Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”

Homer's "The Iliad"

Lovely! Thank you.

 

[Pizzabeak]

"...after killing them the liver glycogen content was determined. It was shown there was a definite loss of glycogen, presumably because of the strong emotion felt by the rat during his decapitation."
I like that, don't you? the strong emotion felt by the rat during his decapitation."

 

[Moser]

Madness it may be, but there is a method to it-Hamlet

There are more things in heaven and earth, horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy-Hamlet

 

[cloudhead]

"At the end of the day, when his hands were worn to a pulp, despite wearing enormous canvas gloves, it seemed to Artyom that he had discovered the true nature of man, as well as the meaning of life. He now viewed man as a clever machine for the decomposition of food and the production of shit, functioning almost without a hitch throughout a life without meaning[...]."

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.
There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all.

.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Spoiler

Original:

Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.

I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.

Original:

Spoiler

Miałeś, chamie, złoty róg, miałeś, chamie, czapkę z piór:
czapki wicher niesie, róg huka po lesie,
ostał ci się ino sznur, ostał ci się ino sznur.

Translation(unpolished):

You had,(you) boor, a golden horn, you had, (you) boor, a cap of feathers:cap goes with the wind, horn blows in the woods, only rope is left for you, only rope is left for you.

 

[Seed-Wad]

"Inside me were unexpressed forces. Because surely self-respect comes not from what we do, but from what we we could do." - Lights out in Wonderland

" 'Less shame,' my Guide said, ever just and kind, 'would wash away a greater fault than yours. Therefore, put back all sorrow from your mind.' " - The Inferno, Dante

"A priest advances slowly, reading his breviary. Now and then he raises his head and looks at the sea approvingly: - the sea is also a breviary, it speaks of God.
Delicate colours, delicate perfumes, souls of spring. 'What a lovely day, the sea is green, I like this dry cold better than the damp.' Poets! If I grabbed one of them back of the coat, if I told him: 'Come, help me,' he'd think, 'What's this crab doing here?' and would run off, leaving his coat in my hands." - Nausea, Sartre

"Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow reapers: for everything about him is ripe for harvest. But he lacks a hundred sickles: so he plucks ears of corn and is annoyed." - Zarathustra, Nietzsche

 

[Moser]

Iusta precor; que me nuper praedata puella est, aut amet aut faciat, cur ego semper amem. A, nimium uolui-tantum patiatur amari; audierit nostras tot Cyntherea preces!-Ovid Amores

I pray for just things; what girl now makes me her captive? May she either love me or be made to love me forever. Ah, I've wanted too much- may she only allow herself to be loved; may you hear our many prayers Venus!

 

[Pizzabeak]

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon. There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What's that little thing of Chopin's she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay.”

“Sir, if you are otherwise discreet, you will consider that you have gone far enough. At my brother's request I am treating you no less kindly than Ampflise treated my uncle Gahmuret, without going to bed together. My kindness would in the long run outweigh hers, if anyone were to weigh us properly. And besides, Sir, I don't know who you are, and yet in such a short space of time you want to have my love.”

“No, Sir, his manners are such that he would not know how to ask a woman to accept his service, although his looks are of Love's color.”

“Alas that he did not ask the question then! I still sorrow for him on that account. For when the sword was put into his hand, it was a sign to him that he should ask. And I pity too his sweet host whom God's displeasure does not spare and who could have been freed from it by a question.”

"He slipped his hand under her mantle, and I think he touched her thigh. This only increased his anguish. Love drove both maid and man to such distress that something came very near happening, if malevolent eyes had not caught sight of it. They were both eager for it.
But see, their hearts' sorrow now approaches. In through the door came a white knight, that is to say a grey-haired one. On recognizing Gawan he named his name in a call to arms and set up a loud shouting: "Alas! and hey-hey! for my master you murdered, and, as if that weren't enough, here you are about to rape his daughter!""

"One day the king rode out alone - and sorely did his people rue it - in search of adventure, rejoicing in Love's assistance. Love's desire compelled him to it. With a poisoned spear he was wounded so in the jousting, your sweet uncle, that he never again was healed, pierced through the testicles."

"Clinschor served her until she rewarded him with love. For this the king robbed him of his honor. If I am to tell you his secret, I must ask your forgiveness, for it is unseemly for me to say such things. One cut of the knife, and Clinschor became a eunuch."
Gawan burst out laughing. Then she told him still more, "In the famous castle of Kalot enbolot he became the mock of the world. The king found Clinschor with his wife, sleeping in her arms. If he found a warm bed there, he had to pay the heavy price that by the hand of the king he was made smooth between the legs. The king thought that was his right. He clipped him in such a way that he can never more give pleasure to any woman. But that has meant suffering for many people."

 

[Anktark]

"Was it only a matter of time before the head of the Boston Consulting Group told an MBA
class, “We bring a panting, sexual intensity to our work.” Or the recruiter from
Fidelity: “Our analysts share a knee-trembling, quivering, orgasmic degree of focus on
company fundamentals.” Or the CFO of Goldman Sachs: “In the people we hire, we
expect to see a stalkerish obsession with financial performance and a downright
creepy fascination with the office and all that goes on there, to the total exclusion of
anything else, which might bring moments of serendipitous joy to their dreary lives.
Going home at any time of day or night signals to us a lack of absolute, maniacal
commitment. We demand total devotion.” What would sound like the ravings of a
madman coming from, say, Kim Jong-Il had become perfectly commonplace coming
from business leaders."


"It's a world of unprovable crimes and fake deaths. Only the pain in the soul remains real - but who would ever measure this pain that slid across the wires and squeezed your heart? We have nothing left except the moral, the funny shabby moral. And we realized that it's so much more comfortable to be a scum or a saint than a human... just a human, a real human."

"Composure first of all.
As I heard, it's a favorite saying of some of our cosmonauts, but just
who remembers the heroes of the past days now?
Composure.
The panic kills faster than the bullet."

 

[Brontosaurie]

"i wanted to see you too uncle ben. i think you're a real pretty man."

//ham on rye, bukowski

 

[Absurdity]

"Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in a perpetual storm."

 

[Steven Gerrard]

"One summer's evening drunk to hell I sat there nearly lifeless
and on the jukebox johnny sang about a thing called love
and old man in the corner sang 'where the water lillies grow'
and it's 'how are you kid?' and 'what's your name?' and 'how's you bloody know...'

'bout blood and death neath a screaming sky,
I lay down on the ground
and the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around
some cursed some prayed some prayed then cursed then prayed and bled some more

and the only thing that I could see, was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
but when we got back, labeled parts one-to-three, there was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me

and a rovin' a rovin' a rovin I'll go..."

 

[tvrgvryen]

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. ”

i don't read much but this is one i like

 

[C.Hecker88]

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

-Frank Herbert, Dune

 

[paradoxparadigm7]

“Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.”

“This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”

 

[Armature_Sally]

Estha and Rahel lifted the little boat and carried it to the water. It looked surprised, like a grizzled fish that had resurfaced from the deep. In dire need of sunlight. It needed scraping, and cleaning, perhaps, but nothing more.
Two happy hearts soared like coloured kites in a skyblue sky. But then, in a slow green whisper, the river (with fish in it, with the sky and trees in it), bubbled in.
Slowly the old boat sank, and settled on the sixth step.
And a pair of two-egg twin hearts sank and settled on the step above the sixth.
The deep-swimming fish covered their mouths with their fins and laughed sideways at the spectacle.

 

[Armature_Sally]

'I hate you!' a seventy-one-year-old woman shouted at a total stranger, somebody she had never seen before in her life, and she punched the person, who was an elderly man, right in the balls. He dropped like a stone to the street but was able to open the package he was carrying and take out a lemon cream pie that he had just purchased from the bakery and shove it into the old woman's knee.

 

[Armature_Sally]

“This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”

I like that, where is it from?

 

[paradoxparadigm7]

I like that, where is it from?

Both of my quotes are from Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.

btw, I always get a chuckle out of your avatar.

 

[Madoness]

[SIZE=-1]But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

[/SIZE]

 

[Perfectly Normal Beast]

"Mr Silly and Mr Nonsense were close friends and saw a lot of each other.
Mr Nonsense was often round at Mr Silly's house playing jigsaw puzzles.
They used to throw the pieces at each other!
How silly!
And Mr Silly was often round at Mr Nonsense's house playing cards.
They used to tear them up to see who could get the most pieces out of one card!
What nonsense!"

Mr Nonsense, Roger Hargreaves

 

[grayskies]

"I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake."

- St. Augustine, Confessions

 

[ABdrew]

I have two.

"Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”

"Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”

Both from Homer's "The Iliad"

Love your avatar, Jane is super cool


Back to the topic:

mine:

"Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck"

 

[doncarlzone]

“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”

 

[ABdrew]

and here's another one,


"I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature."

- Muhammad Iqbal

 

[StevenM]

"Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck"

Coincidentally, I was just thinking that today.

I don't have any favorite quotes. I'll just post one that I've seen today:

"He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger"- Confucius

 

[Absurdity]

“But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.”

 

[zerkalo]

"As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass "

 

[Yellow]

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”

-- Daniel Quinn Ishmael

 

[Perfectly Normal Beast]

The Abbé tried to prove that real laws took precedence, and that without the conventions established between men the laws of nature would scarcely amount to much more than natural skulduggery. 'We have need', he was saying, 'of notaries, and priests, and witnesses, and contracts, and dispensations.'
The Ingenu answered him with the observation that savages have always made: 'You must be a pretty dishonest lot then, if you have to take so many precautions with each other.'

The Ingenu, Voltaire

 

[Brontosaurie]

"i wanted to see you too uncle ben. i think you're a real pretty man."

//ham on rye, bukowski

repeat

 

[Cherry Cola]

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

 

[The Grey Man]

I don't have any favorite quotes. I'll just post one that I've seen today:

"He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger"- Confucius

It works the other way around, too.

 

[Absurdity]

Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

 

[Cherry Cola]

"Hauptfuhrer chanted to his linemen: "Contain. Contain. Contain those people. Infringe. Infringe on them. Rape that man, Link. Rape him. Ray-yape that man."
Dennis Smee, at middle linebacker, shouted down at the front four: "Tango-two. Reset red. Hoke that bickie. Mutt, mutt, mutt."

 

[Perfectly Normal Beast]

"Such nonsense!" declared Dr Greysteel. "Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!"
"Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. "That has a moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections."

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

 

[zerkalo]

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
― James Joyce

 

[Perfectly Normal Beast]

The quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot!’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of quarrels - whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor, where she was bound to trip over it.
‘Now, you cow,’ I said, ‘move it yourself.’
Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has upon one’s manners.

Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

“They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery's gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.”

Homage to Catalonia, G. Orwell

 

[Dramatic Gecko]

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

 

[zerkalo]

"Risen from the stench of the manure pile—even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity—the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure.
For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty, even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds."

___the language of flowers, Georges Bataille

 

[Frankie]

I can't wait till I have grandchildren. When I was younger, I had to walk to the rim of a crater. Uphill! In an EVA suit! On Mars, ya little shit! Ya hear me? Mars!
-Andy Weir, The Martian