I Had Hysterical Impulses, With Tears and Convulsions. I Had No Resource Except Reading.

Showing one-19 of 19

#one

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is non right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was e'er truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-charade and ignorance who is harmed."
― Meditations
#ii

"Begin each day past telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. Only for my part I have long perceived the nature of expert and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my blood brother (non in the physical sense, but as a fellow animate being similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can hurt me, for nobody tin implicate me in what is degrading. Neither tin can I exist angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a human'due south ii easily, anxiety or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is confronting Nature's law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction."
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
#3

"The best revenge is non to be similar your enemy."
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
#iv

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, big-headed, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of skilful, and the ugliness of evil, and accept recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same claret and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And and so none of them tin can injure me. No ane can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were built-in to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel acrimony at someone, to turn your dorsum on him: these are unnatural."
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
#5

"Sometimes, immersed in his books, in that location would come to him the awareness of all that he did non know, of all that he had not read; and the repose for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know."
― John Williams, Stoner
#6

"Capacity for the nobler feelings is in about natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, simply by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of immature persons it rapidly dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that college capacity in practice. Men lose their high aspirations every bit they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying."
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
#seven

"Allow us cultivate our garden."
― Voltaire, Candide
#8

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
#9

"A rose past any other name would odor as sweetness."
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
#10

"Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The get-go is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot limited information technology, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean annihilation or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the almost marked characteristic of modernistic English prose, and especially of whatever kind of political writing. As soon as sure topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to retrieve of turns of voice communication that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their significant, and more and more than of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-business firm."
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
#eleven

"Indulge your passion for science…but let your science be man, and such as may accept a direct reference to action and gild. Be a philosopher; but among all your philosophy, be notwithstanding a human being."
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Homo Agreement
#12

"For goodness sake,' they'll cry, 'y'all cannot argue against it--two times ii is 4! Nature doesn't consult yous; it doesn't requite a damn for your wishes or whether its laws please or exercise non please yous. You must accept it as information technology is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall. ...' And so on and then forth. Good God, what exercise I care well-nigh the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don't like these laws, including the 'two times two is four'? Of class, I cannot break through this wall with my head if I don't have the strength to break through it, just neither will I have it just considering I face up a stone wall and am not stiff enough."
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Hole-and-corner
#thirteen

"In the beginning place I spent most of my time at domicile, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the but external means I had was reading. Reading, of class, was a swell help--exciting me, giving me pleasance and pain. Only at times information technology bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were astute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, in that location was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, likewise; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I accept not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own do good, gentlemen. I don't desire to lie. I vowed to myself I would non."
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
#14

"I tell you lot solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. Only I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness."
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
#fifteen

"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful human. I am an unpleasant human being. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my illness, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat information technology and never take, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated plenty non to be superstitious, simply I am.) No, I refuse to care for it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I empathise it. Of course I tin can't explicate to you simply whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors past not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But nonetheless, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it go fifty-fifty worse!"
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Hole-and-corner, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The Business firm of the Dead
#xvi

"Those who tin can make y'all believe absurdities, can brand you commit atrocities."
― Voltaire
#17

"I accept wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am even so in dearest with life. This ridiculous weakness is mayhap one of our more than stupid melancholy propensities, for is in that location anything more than stupid than to be eager to become on carrying a burden which 1 would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold information technology fast, to fondle the serpent that devours us until information technology has eaten our hearts away?"
― Voltaire, Candide: or, Optimism
#18

"Oh, gentlemen, do y'all know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent homo, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, similar all of usa. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is blubbering, that is, the intentional pouring of h2o through a sieve?"
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Hugger-mugger
#19

"I cannot brand yous understand. I cannot brand anyone understand what is happening within me. I cannot even explain it to myself."
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis