Quotes by Hungarian Authors - Page 2

It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision. In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.
Dennis Gabor
When he said someone had "died", Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.
Paul Erdős
I am not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless I'm always saying that the SF( The SF is the supreme Fascist, the Number-One guy up there) has this transfinite book-transfinite being a concept in mathematics that is larger than infinite-that contains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect.
Paul Erdős
In a way, mathematics is the only infinite human activity. It is conceivable that humanity could eventually learn everything in physics or biology. But humanity certainly won't ever be able to find out everything in mathematics, because the subject is infinite. Numbers themselves are infinite. That's why mathematics is really my only interest.
Paul Erdős
It was youWho opened meLooked into my soulTo study meYou revealed youTo uncover me.
David Somorai
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful.
Andrew S. Grove
Business success contains the seeds of its destruction.
Andrew S. Grove
The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your buisness.
Andrew S. Grove
Don't differentiate without a difference.
Andrew S. Grove
There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else — but persistent.
Raoul Bott
Naturally the descendants of survivors meet regularly with phenomena in the course of their lives which, for the parents, are in associative connection with the suppressed fearful memories. These phenomena are carriers of grave memories for the survivor parent. The heightened emotional tension, hyperactivity of the parents and grandparents when the child eats or excretes draws the child's attention to the fact that behind these phenomena lies some unknown, painful, shameful secret.
Terez Virag
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.
Eugene Paul Wigner
The life of the hero of the tale is, at the outset, overshadowed by bitter and hopeless struggles; one doubts that the little swineherd will ever be able to vanquish the awful Dragon with the twelve heads. And yet, ...truth and courage prevail and the youngest and most neglected son of the family, of the nation, of mankind, chops off all twelve heads of the Dragon, to the delight of our anxious hearts. This exultant victory, towards which the hero of the tale always strives, is the hope and trust of the peasantry and of all oppressed peoples. This hope helps them bear the burden of their destiny.
Gyula Illyés
The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.
Thomas Szasz
Quite often, when an idea that could be helpful presents itself, we do not appreciate it, for it is so inconspicuous. The expert has, perhaps, no more ideas than the inexperienced, but appreciates more what he has and uses it better.
George Pólya
This compound should be available from most good drugstores. I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently............In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule.
Andrew S. Grove
I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued. "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community--which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.
Arthur Koestler
…is there anyone so deaf that he cannot hear in Byzantine churches some echo of the Catacombs? What could be more natural than that just as martyrs made paintings for martyrs, latter-day bureaucrats paint for bureaucrats?
Miklos Haraszti
You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.'No, I didn’t. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.
Arthur Koestler
For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course. Her course had many twists and windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the movement; there was nothing exalted about it: it was the logical solution to political divergences
Arthur Koestler
The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
Thomas Szasz
Just because our opinions on what is right are different, doesn’t make me evil.
Adam Scythe
The reality is that the American people have no desire for an empire. This is not to say that they don't want the benefits, both economic and strategic. It simply means that they don't want to pay the price. Economically, Americans want the growth potential of open markets but not the pains. Politically, they want to have an enormous influence, but not the resentment of the world. Military, they want to be protected from dangers but not to bear the burdens of long-term strategy.
George Friedman
A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
George Friedman
[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.
Arthur Koestler
Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism, in particular the freedom to believe what you will in private. But secularism also poses a public problem. There are those whose beliefs are so different from others’ beliefs that finding common ground in the public space is impossible. And then there are those for whom the very distinction between private and public is either meaningless or unacceptable. The complex contrivances of secularism have their charm, but not everyone is charmed.
George Friedman
Eternity is to us as time, the age to come, the continuation, the manifestation, and perfection of our present and true existence.
Adolph Saphir
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey
It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
János Arany
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
Arthur Koestler
Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.
Sándor Márai
Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
Stephen Vizinczey
The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.
Antal Szerb
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic
Thomas Szaz
Remember: If you go for a walk with a friend in England, don't say a single word for hours; if you go for a walk with your dog, talk to it all the time.
George Mikes
Tears have the value of gold on the scales of the human heart' and the weights do not ask whether it is found or stolen gold, or whether you had to sweat in the digging.
Ferenc Molnár
It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.
Gabor Maté
There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals." (1949)
György Lukács
As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing; most people, expect that in adulthood things will get better. During the early years of adulthood the future still looks promising. But inevitably the mirror' shows the first white hairs and confirms the fact that those few extra pounds are not about to leave; eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body...' Where's all that money I was to have made? Where are all of the good times I was going to have?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Passion creates, addiction consumes.
Gabor Maté
The War on Drugs, from the Hastings-facing window of the PortlandHotel, is manifested in the pregnant Celia kneeling on the sidewalk,handcuffed wrists behind her back, eyes cast on the ground. Therewas no Detective-Sergeant Gillespie to protect her when, as a littlegirl, she was raped by her stepfather and subjected to the nocturnalspitting ritual, so in the War on Drugs she has become one of theenemy.
Gabor Maté
Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when peolme don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves.
Gabor Maté
The Dark Angel had seen much over the course of the past millennia, the passing of hundreds of thousands of mortal lives. He felt neither remorse nor mercy for the enemies he had felled in the course of wars and battles. He did what he had to do and believed that the people of Earth did not deserve all the good things they had received. For him, most people were harmful parasites who, in the process of their brief mortal lives, tried to get ahead by climbing over each other and destroying their own homes. He looked down on them and their love of material things. He believed that the star of humankind was waning, and that its brief stay on Earth would serve, at most, to swell the ranks of slaves in the underworld, where eventually darkness would eat them away.
A.O. Esther
„Those who decide to live in the Present, must leave their past behind.
Frank Wanderer
The town , wrapped in red and green, greeted him, welcome him home as he drove down familiar streets. Driving his old truck filled Hunter with pleasure. He didn't have to look for IEDs on the side of the road. He grinned all the way to the apartment, enjoying the ride, the peace of the nigh, the old brick buildings on Main Street, the holiday finery, the palpable presence of town spirit.tHe parked his truck in front of the apartment building that Ethan owned as a side business, and suddenly couldn't wait another second. He hurried up the front stairs, down the inside styaircase, then just about ran down the hallway to his basement-level unit.tHe had his key in his hand, but the doorknob turned easily as he put his hand on it. Cindy had left the door open for him.tHe grinned like a fool as he walked in. The loose floorboard in the middle of the living room creaked a familiar welcome as he passed his army duffel bag on the floor where he'd dumped it earlier. Cindy's little pink purse sat on his brown leather couch like a cupcake on a tray.t"Cindy?" He strode toward the bedroom in the back, his smile spreading as he anticipated a private party. If she was waiting for him naked in bed, the proposal would have to wait a litt. "Honey?"tBut she wasn't waiting for him naked.tShe was waiting for him dead.
Dana Marton
She turned on the radio. Christmas music filled the car. She turned it off with a groan.t"It's not going to turn you into an elf if you listen," he promised and liked the smile that played at the corner of her lips, wiggling the small mole that kept drawing his attention.tShe glanced at him. "Do you believe in Christmas?"t"I do," he said without hesitation.t"Even after all you've seen and done overseas?"t"Especially because of that...
Dana Marton
I learned from a tough Philly cop, Carmen Morales. She taught me the rules."t"What rules?"t"Rule #1: Trust no one. Rule #2: Miss nothing. Rule #3: Reveal nothing. Rule #4: Question everything. Rule #5: Eye on the clock. Rule #6: Get lucky. Rule #7: Trust your instincts.t"Good rules to live by. The army has rules too."t"I bet.
Dana Marton
He smiled. "I bet the paper ran something about you once your hiring was confirmed. A new cop is big news in a small town. People were probably admonished to make you feel at home."tShe shook her head with some amusement. "I would have felt more at home if they shot at me,.
Dana Marton
Wendy Belle wasn't the type of model foreign princes married. Yes, tall and graceful, but she didn't radiate a Grace Kelly-like cold beauty. Her lips were too sensuous for that, her eyes too mysterious. Her face was beautiful and perfect in its own way. More than beautiful - interesting. She was the type of woman a man could look at for a lifetime and not get bored.
Dana Marton
The man's gaze hesitated on the four-inch cut on Joe's left cheek, courtesy of the log that had slapped him in the face on the river. With twenty-some stitches sticking out, the wound looked like a giant red caterpillar was crawling across Joe's face.t"Well, that'll disappoint the ladies." But then the captain grunted. "Never mind. With you, they'll probably like it, think it's all manly." He peered behind Joe. "Anyone naked in there?"tJoe stepped aside. "I'm having an off morning.
Dana Marton
His last encounter with Wendy... Hell, she'd been the one to hurt his feelings.tThe best sex of his life, and she'd kicked him out as soon as it was over, told him not to bother with calling because it was strictly a one-time thing. Told him, actually, while he'd still been inside her.tHe groaned at the memory as he slipped behind the wheel, turning on the heat the second he had the engine started.tHis day was shaping up to be an ass kicker. Which was saying something, considering that the day before included his arrest, a concussion, and a near drowning.
Dana Marton
His phone rang just as he set his evidence kit on the ground. He glanced at the display and took the call. "Hey, Mom."t"I ran into Cindy Jenners at the store today."t"No."t"She's such a nice young woman."t"Not interested."t"Your sisters abandoned me."t"They didn't abandon you. They got married."t"They moved to other states. I don't have a single grandchild. within driving distance. How can they be so curel?" She gave a guilt-laden pause. "Mrs. Ottmann said she saw you talking to some blonde with Massachusetts license plates by the feed store yesterday."tChase closed his eyes and brushed his thumb and forefinger over his eyelids. "I was giving her a speeding ticket...
Dana Marton
He updated his report, doing his best to tune out the two men who staggered into the police station, dragging each other.t"I want you to arrest this idiot bastard," the taller one shouted, face contorted with rage. "He shit on my front porch!"tYour dog shits all over my yard every day," the other one countered shoving.tCalm down, please," Leila said when they reached reception.tThe tall one thumped a fist on the counter. "I want to make a police report. I stepped in that shit!"tChase checked out the floor behind them, the questionable footprints. Made a mental note to walk around them when he left.
Dana Marton
Okay, more disclosure. I'm not a fugitive at the moment, but I might become one. I don't know if I'm going back for a trial. I can't go to prison and leave the twins alone. We'll leave before it comes to that. I don't want to get you in trouble."tHilda waved off the words. "I'm an old woman. They ain't gonna take me out of here in shackles. I've seen most of the local officers run around in diapers."tLuanne was pretty sure that didn't mean immunity. She'd seen Chase naked, and that hadn't stopped him from arresting her. She didn't tell that to Aunt Hilda.
Dana Marton
I'm a patient man, but I'm not going to wait endlessly."t"But...," She stammered.t"But what?"t"It's so fast."tHe growled. "When I went slow, you wanted fast. Now I'm going fast, you want slow. Luanne Mayfair, are you trying to drive me crazy on purpose, or is it just a lucky side benefit as far as you're concerned?
Dana Marton
She was hot, he was a man; not being attracted would have been impossible. That gleaming dark hair tempted a man to find out what it would look like released from its tight bun. She had toned, endless legs. Her li8ps were distracting, especially that teasing mole in the corner. She could give a dead monk a boner.
Dana Marton
He kissed her dizzy, then lifted her. She wrapped her legs around his waisst as he kissed his way down her neck.t"Make love to me," she whispered. "Like I'm a full-grown woman."tHe pulled back to look at her. "As opposed to...?
Dana Marton
Bing tightened his fingers around hers...."I know what I want."tShe raised an eyebrow. "What is that?"t"Only you." And as he said the words, he felt a tremendous weight lifting from his chest. "It's always been only you..."t"All right." She narrowed her eyes. "But if you break my heart, I'm going to have Peaches have words with you."t"That's threatening a police officer. Technically.""What are you going to do?" She flashed him a teasing smile. "Arrest me?"tHe bent his head to hers, all the way to her ear. "Stick with me and there might just be some handcuffs in your future," he whispered.tShe laughed out loud. "I'll take that as an incentive to speedily recover.
Dana Marton
He glanced around, his eyes widening a little when he looked toward her bedroom.tShe winced, but resisted the urge to jump and close the door. He was staring at the poster above her bed, an image of Annie Oakley with the quote "I ain't afraid to love a man. I ain't afraid to shoot him either.
Dana Marton