Quote collection
209 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?"
"As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished."
"The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence."
"The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him."
"Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside"
". . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better."
"Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer."
"I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments."
"Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated."
"Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can."
"A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended."
"Age carries with it a double load of guilt."
"The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write."
"Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins."
"There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity."
"We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow."
"Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere."
"Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet."
"In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others."
"Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love."