Home
Authors
Topics
Quote of the Day
Home
Authors
Topics
Quote of the Day
Home
Authors
Topics
Quote of the Day
Top 100 Quotes
Professions
Nationalities
Quotes by Philosophers
- Page 327
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard
My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.
Ayn Rand
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Pierre Abélard
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
Books are for nothing but to inspire
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
Baltasar Gracián
I felt like poisoning a monk.
Umberto Eco
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Umberto Eco
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
Susan Sontag
Writing is the geometry of the soul.
Plato
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
Umberto Eco
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
Umberto Eco
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it
Karl R. Popper
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
Simone de Beauvoir
All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
Denis Diderot
If you wish to be a writer, write.
Epictetus
All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
Umberto Eco
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.
Jean-Paul Sartre
People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
Jacques Derrida
Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.
Gilles Deleuze
We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
Allen Ginsberg
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Walter Benjamin
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]
Susan Sontag
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.
Criss Jami
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
Muriel Barbery
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One should use common words to say uncommon things
Arthur Schopenhauer
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valéry
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
Alan W. Watts
A book is a suicide postponed.
Emil M. Cioran
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Voltaire
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Albert Camus
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
Aldous Huxley
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.
Simone de Beauvoir
I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life
Simone de Beauvoir
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity.
Simone de Beauvoir
The rather difficult antagonists towards the Church consist not nearly of the cruel and heartless, nihilistic intellectuals who hate God and humanity, but the well-meaning spirits who for the most part lack an understanding of the Spirit.
Criss Jami
If life is music, I sometimes feel as though I was born on the off-beat of the song, and I love it. As Christian numbers reportedly decrease in America, my love for Christ feels as though it increases. Perhaps that is a little strange, yes, but in all honesty, I now want to be thought unfaithful about as much as a smug aristocrat wants to be thought a hobo.
Criss Jami
To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
In the intelligent man faith is the only remedy for anguish.The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, work.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.
Criss Jami
God has been FAITHFUL to me, in Him I have FAITH.
Gift Gugu Mona
God has been FAITHFUL to me, that why I have FAITH in Him.
Gift Gugu Mona
God has been FAITHFUL to me, He still is and always will be; that's why I have FAITH in Him.
Gift Gugu Mona
Is it 'Stockholm syndrome' when your God has never once misguided your steps? I think not! Let the lost ones dart across the darkness, bashing into walls, pretending to love their ways as we delight in obedience to the footsteps of Christ which bring us to freedom. By Faith we wander - not because we are lost, but because we are free.
Criss Jami
It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.
Søren Kierkegaard
I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.
Umberto Eco
You are a hater of activity in life; quite right, for before there can be any meaning in activity, life must have continuity, and this your life lacks. You occupy yourself with your studies, that is true, you are even industrious. But it is only for your own sake and is done with as little teleology as possible. Otherwise you are unoccupied; like those workers in the Gospel, you stand idle in the marketplace (Matthew 20:3). You stick your hands in your pockets and observe life. Then you rest in despair, nothing occupies you, you don’t step aside for anything: “if someone were to throw a tile down from the roof I wouldn’t get out of the way.” You are like someone dying, you die daily, not in the profound, serious sense in which one usually takes that word, but life has lost its reality and “you always reckon your lifetime from one day’s notice to quit to the next”. You let everything pass you by, it makes no impression, but then suddenly something comes which grips you, an idea, a situation, a smile from a young girl, and then you are “in touch”; for just as on some occasions you are not in touch, so at others you are in touch and of service in every way. Wherever something is going on you are “in touch”. You conduct your life as it is your custom to behave in a crowd, you “work your way into the thickest of it, trying if possible to be forced up above the others so as to be able to lie on top of them”; if you manage to get up there you “make yourself as comfortable as possible”, and this is also the way you let yourself be carried along through life. But when the crowd disperses, when the event is over, you stand once more at the street corner and look at the world. A dying person possesses, as you know, a supernatural energy, and so too with you. If there is an idea to be thought through, a work to be read through, a plan to be carried out, a little adventure to be experienced - yes, a hat to be bought, you take hold of the matter with an immense energy. According to circumstance, you work on untiringly for a day, for a month; you are happy in the assurance that you still have the same abundance of strength as before, you take no rest, “no Satan can keep up with you”. If you work together with others, you work them into the ground. But then when the month or, what you always consider the maximum, the six months have gone, you break off and say, “and that’s the end of the story”. You retire and leave it all to the other party, or if you have been working alone you talk to no one about what you were doing. You then pretend to yourself and others that you have lost the desire and flatter yourself with the vain thought that you could have kept working with the same intensity if that is what you desired. But that is an immense deception. You would have succeeded in finishing it, as most others, if you had patiently willed it so, but you would have found out at the same time that it needs a kind of perseverance quite different from yours.
Søren Kierkegaard
Previous
1
…
325
326
327
328
329
…
376
Next