Thread: Memorable Passages

“Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

"When the bells jostle in the tower
the hollow night amid,
then on my tongue the taste is sour
of all I ever did."

-- A.E. Housman

Originally Posted by misskit

"When the bells jostle in the tower
the hollow night amid,
then on my tongue the taste is sour
of all I ever did."

-- A.E. Housman

"When the balls jostle 'neath the tower
his nightshirt lift amid
then on my tongue the taste is sour
from all the bastard's jizz."

--Mrs Housman

“All are one”
― Heraclitus

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.”
― Lao Tzu

“Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned...”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers

“An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.”
― Knut Hamsun

“Keep it, keep it!" I answered. "You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn't amount to anything—about everything I own in the world.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.”
― Knut Hamsun, Mysteries

“The other one he loved like a slave, like a madman and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life.”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers

“The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.”
― Knut Hamsun

“A country preacher could not have looked more full of milk and honey than this formidable writer, whose words had always left long bloody marks wherever they fell.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“A man comes walking north. He carries a sack, the first sack, containing provisions for the road and some implements. The man is strong and rough-hewn, with a red lion beard and little scars on face and hands, sites of old wounds--were they gotten at work or in a fight? Maybe he has been in jail and wants to go into hiding, or perhaps he is a philosopher looking for peace; in any case, here he comes, a human being in the midst of this immense solitude. He walks and walks, in a silence broken by neither bird nor beast.”
― Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil

“My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.”
― Socrates