Quote collection
180 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."
"As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very primitive. How many thousands of years of culture, think you, have rubbed and polished at our raw edges? One probably; at the best, no more than two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla."
"Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past."
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
"The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage."
"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog."
"It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all."
"The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept."
"Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment."
"There's only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappointment s."
"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive."
"I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet."
"I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself."
"Bog-lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies ... this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels — your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches. Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget."
"To be able to forget means sanity."
"Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time."
"Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them."
"Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen."