Quotes to inspire and reflect

Gott ist tot: aber so wie die Art der Menschen ist, wird es vielleicht noch Jahrtausende lang Höhlen geben, in denen man seinen Schatten zeigt.—Und wir—wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen!

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: “Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!”

When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.

In dreams we all resemble this savage.

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

Dieu est mort!

[ Explaining why he walked a lobster on a leash in the gardens of the Palais Royal :] I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.

I want

You are like nobody else since I love you.

I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire.

The only compliment he ever paid her was You sweat less than any fat girl I know.

The trouble with a kitten is

I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

There was a young belle of old Natchez

Every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.:

Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer.

Candy

Senator Smoot is an institute

Gird up your l—ns,

The Bronx?

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.

Worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

One of those “Two Cultures” is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such “physics” and such “humanities”?

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

[ To a railway stationmaster :] We must leave exactly on time. . . . From now on everything must function to perfection.

Rome-Berlin axis.

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.

On ne Badine pas avec l’Amour .

Never mind the bottle, as long as it gets you drunk.

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms. . . . Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften .

Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

I was walking along the road with two friends.

When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. . . . When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.