H C3 A9roes Quotes

I told you. There's nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer's pen. I had thoughts like, It's not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn't see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn't care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn't necessary. I also have medals and awards - but that's because I wasn't afraid of dying. I didn't care! It was even something of an out. They'd have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands. ~ H.L. Mencken

And it is characteristic of the devil to be recognized too late. ~ Helene Cixous

If these d'Herelle bodies were really genes, fundamentally like our chromosome genes, they would give us an utterly new angle from which to attack the gene problem. They are filterable, to some extent isolable, can be handled in test-tubes, and their properties, as shown by their effects on the bacteria, can then be studied after treatment. It would be very rash to call these bodies genes, and yet at present we must confess that there is no distinction known between the genes and them. Hence we can not categorically deny that perhaps we may be able to grind genes in a mortar and cook them in a beaker after all. Must we geneticists become bacteriologists, physiological chemists and physicists, simultaneously with being zoologists and botanists? Let us hope so. ~ Hermann Joseph Muller

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on earth. ~ Linji Yixuan

Und nicht wahr, wenn man ihn zwänge, in das Licht selbst zu sehen, so würde er Schmerzen an den Augen haben, davonlaufen und sich wieder jenen Schattengegenständen zuwenden, die er ansehen kann, und würde dabei bleiben, diese wären wirklich deutlicher als die, welche er gezeigt bekam?

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him? ~ Plato

Everything that I have known
You'll write to me to remind
Me of, and likewise I shall do
The whole past I'll recount to you ~ Friedrich Holderlin

Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?" I ask. "The foundation of
mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would
say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?"
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers.
The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human
consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know
what the mathematical expression is for longing?"
He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup.
"The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing
something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child
discovers the in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the
stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads
to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce rational numbers.
And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds
an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers."
He warms French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill.
"It's a form of madness.' Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be
written down. They force human consciousness out bey ~ Peter Høeg

Ever since he'd given up money, certain people had called him a freeloader, a parasite. (As one comment-thread malapropist put it: "Do you Believe you are smooching off others?") They demanded to know what he was giving back. To which Suelo asked, Who says you need to give something back? What does a raven give? What does a barnacle give, or a coyote? In his view, every living thing gave plenty, merely by existing. But from a strictly materialistic view, his critics had an excellent point. A raven contributes nothing, except of course his own corpse, which will feed some other being. Now Suelo was dying, and he offered his body to the ravens, the coyotes, the ringtails, the mice, the ants. ~ Mark Sundeen

Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When we come under the spell of the deeper domain of technology, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinate us less than its playful side. Then we realize we that we are involved in a play, a dance of the spirit, which cannot be grasped by calculation. What is ultimately left for science is intuition alone - a call of destiny.
This playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. The crude observer can only be impressed by large quantities - chiefly when they are in motion - and yet there are as many organs in a fly as in a leviathan. ~ Ernst Junger

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.
For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool's motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket. ~ Ernst Junger

The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire ...
When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph ...
Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms. ~ Ernst Junger

You'll be so busy with Bridge and what's-his-name that you'll forget all about your English mate, St. Clair."
"Ha! So you are English!" I poke him in the stomach.
He grabs my hand and we wrestle, laughing. "I claim ... no ... nationality. ~ Stephanie Perkins

But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn't that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them; on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn't actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something which could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinúviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that Lúthien Tinúviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

We participate, without feeling it's significance, to a battle of the free life against the profitable agony.
This battle is not lead the way military do. It never expects neither victory nor defeat, it does not rely on tactics, it mobilizes nor brute force nor the ruse. It is not based on any project, nor any action plan.
It is a battle on between a decay of all things, a weariness of the people that convinced them to die, and the permanent revival of a life that will never give up, permanently claims rights, and progresses through its quiet determination to ignore the obstacles. ~ Raoul Vaneigem

There's a word for this in English," he mused, still soft. "I can't recall it. I've made you a ... a fallen women. Yes?"
"Yes," I agreed, still smiling. "Thank you ever so much."
"It's been entirely my pleasure," he said in Romanian, and I turned my face into his sleeve and began to laugh. ~ Shana Abe

Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or tshould the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being. ~ Edouard Leve

I'm a very ordinary man who's worked and fed like everyone else. I'm no longer afraid of dying, but death doesn't seem to want anything to do with me, now that I can see no point in living. I'm afraid he's forgotten me. ~ Emile Zola

Without hope, Chöd practitioners are freed from the limits of hope and fear; having cut the ropes of grasping, definitely enlightened, where does one go? ~ Machik Labdrön

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. ~ Umberto Eco

If we are given a chance to go back to our youth, we won't go back, because we cannot give up our accumulated wisdom and we cannot give up the things that belong to our time! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Write in different places - for example, in a laundromat, and pick up on the rhythm of the washing machines. Write at bus stops, in cafés. Write what is going on around you. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Some people's spirits, but some of them will never be dull not be blunted. ~ Mehmet Kececi

I´ve read that it´s the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it. ~ Jo Nesbø

[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is
at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

The anarch, as I have expounded elsewhere, is the pendant to the monarch; he is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule. ~ Ernst Junger

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Ugly is, as Ugly does! ~ Lorene Stunson Hill

She appeared to him more beautiful than he had ever seen her yet. Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. [...] ~ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.

Beatha
- do Mháire Mhic Amhlaoibh,
An Fál Mór, Co. Mhaigh Eo.

- Níor airigh tú caint ar an slabhcán? -
arsa Mary Nell le hiontas,
an slabhcán a bhailíodh sí ina gearrchaile di
ar charraigreacha an Fháil Mhóir,
a thugadh sí abhaile
is a ghearradh go mion, é a bhruith ainsin le deoirín uisce.
Nuair a d'fhuaraíodh sé dhéanadh sí leac -
an blas a bhíodh air leis an ngráinne salainn!

Níor bhlais Mary Nell an slabhcán le dhá scór bliain:
- Ní bhadrálann éinne thart anseo a thuilleadh leis,
Róleitheadhach atá siad.
Ach an stuif sin a bhíonns ag fear an tsiopa
I bpotaí beaga a thigeann sé, dath pinc air -
'Yoghurt?'
- Yoghurt. Yoghurt!
M'anam go liveálfainn ar an stuif sin.
M'anam go liveálfainn air. - ~ Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin

I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week.
"Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself.
"Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be. ~ Roberto Bolano

It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem. ~ Mark Kac

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Why did everyone like that story so much when it wasn't true? Why was everyone so eager to believe it? Was it because, in real life, ever after's generally stink? ~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

Nice to eat you ... uhm ... meet you! ~ Lasky Kathryn

Are you feeling helpless when you think about the dark roads of the future? Then read the biographies of the great men! Learn their life stories; they will lead you to the light! Buddha will lead you to the light; Gandhi will lead you to the light! Men of wider horizons will broaden our own horizons! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal. ~ Victor Hugo