seth's quotes

Dickens on ambition and enemies

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:37:25 -0700

". . . judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day."

— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

Charlotte Bronte on Prejudice

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:24:45 -0700

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

— Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)

Charlotte Bronte on Happiness

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:21:05 -0700

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato.

— Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)

Dante on humanity's dignity

Mon, 19 May 2008 11:04:32 -0700

"'O brothers," I said, "who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the west, to this so little vigil of our senses that remains, do not choose to deny the experience of [what lies] behind the sun, of the world without human beings. Consider your seed [the race you spring from]: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.'"

Inferno
(Canto 26, lines 112-120)

— Dante

Leo Tolstoy on the myth of great men

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:27:34 -0700

In historical events great men—so-called—are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

War and Peace

— Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy on complete sorrow

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:20:25 -0700

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

--War and Peace
Book XV, chapter 1

— Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy on Solitude and Society

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:17:44 -0700

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.

--War and Peace
Book X, chapter 17

— Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:13:11 -0700

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth--science--which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

--War and Peace
Book IX, chapter 10

— Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy on Good and Evil

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:11:33 -0700

He had the unlucky capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take any serious part in life. Every sphere of activity was, in his eyes, linked with evil and deception

--Book VIII, chapter 1

— Leo Tolstoy

Douglas Adams on food choices

Mon, 19 May 2008 09:05:26 -0700

Fruit and berries on strange planets either make you live or make you die. Therefore the point at which to start toying with them is when you're going to die if you don't. That way you stay ahead. The secret to healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food.
--Ford Prefect

— Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams on saving universes

Mon, 19 May 2008 08:46:21 -0700

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.
--Life, The Universe and Everything

— Douglas Adams

The worth of the soul

Mon, 19 May 2008 08:29:58 -0700

Ulysses Everett McGill: What'd the devil give you for your soul, Tommy?
Tommy Johnson: Well, he taught me to play this here guitar real good.
Delmar O'Donnell: Oh son, for that you sold your everlasting soul?
Tommy Johnson: Well, I wasn't usin' it.

— Ethan and Joel Coen

Ulysses Everett McGill on Faith

Sun, 18 May 2008 23:37:41 -0700

Tommy Johnson: I had to be up at that there crossroads last midnight, to sell my soul to the devil.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't it a small world, spiritually speaking. Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved. I guess I'm the only one that remains unaffiliated.

— Ethan and Joel Coen

Ulysses Everett McGill on Logic

Sun, 18 May 2008 23:34:40 -0700

Pete: You miserable little snake! You stole from my kin!
Ulysses Everett McGill: Who was fixin' to betray us.
Pete: You didn't know that at the time.
Ulysses Everett McGill: So I borrowed it until I did know.
Pete: That don't make no sense!
Ulysses Everett McGill: Pete, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.

— Ethan and Joel Coen

Ulysses Everett McGill on Women

Sun, 18 May 2008 23:24:06 -0700

Ulysses Everett McGill: Deceitful, two-faced she-woman. Never trust a female Delmar, remember that one simple precept and your time with me will not have been ill spent.
Delmar O'Donnell: Ok, Everett.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Hit by a train! Truth means nothing to a woman, Delmar. Trying for the subjective. You ever been with a woman?
Delmar O'Donnell: Well, I... I... I gotta get the family farm back before I can start thinking about that.
Ulysses Everett McGill: That's right, if then. Believe me Delmar, woman is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man.

— Ethan and Joel Coen