Hriday > Hriday's Quotes

“That's the way it is. If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naivety will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, 'till only the skeleton of your dream is left. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world - which is to say the powers that be - would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn't believe in it at all.”
― Ben Okri

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.”
― John F. Kennedy

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

“While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."

He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Shawn said.
“It’s not ironic at all,” Gus said.
“Dude, it’s so like a black fly in your chardonnay.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that’s not ironic, either?”
“Rain on your wedding day?”
“‘Irony’ is the use of words to convey a meaning that’s opposite to their literal meaning,” Gus said. “That stupid song came out fourteen years ago, and we still have this exact conversation at least once a week.”
“Yeah,” Shawn said. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
― William Rabkin, A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I love to sleep. Do you? Isn't it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.”
― Rita Rudner

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits.”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
― Mark Twain

“This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.”
― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries

“The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?”
― Frank Zappa

“Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?”
― Frank Zappa

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beast”
― Ruskin Bond