"Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery."
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Doe quotes
Doe
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Doe quotes (page 176 of 564)
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"The good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgement, it ravishes and overwhelms it."
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"The archer who overshoots his mark does no better than he who falls short of it."
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"The study of books is a drowsy and feeble exercise which does not warm you up."
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"We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?"
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"Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us."
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"It is a small soul, buried beneath the weight of affairs, that does not know how to get clean away from them, that cannot put them aside and pick them up again."
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"Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?"
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"If [Donald Trump] comes forward and if he does that, then, of course, there will be some engagement."
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"I don't have the stressful job. Barack Obama does."
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"Wine taken in moderation never does any harm."
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"When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?"
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"But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless."
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"What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating."
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"The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses."
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"For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability."
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"To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in."
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"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."
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"The sages say that life is illusion, but does that change its poignancy?"
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"There's something about us using the word fascism and thinking about, "What is it? What does it mean, and what are the tenets of it?"."
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