“What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 502 of 4756
“Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.”
“To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.”
“There is a certain period of the soul-culture when it begins to interfere with some of characters of typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring of the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its way out to heaven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel; and there is, in this indication of subduing the mortal by the immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range than that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul than of, the fair and ruddy countenance of David.”
“No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.”
“He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.”
“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”
“How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world improve a sense of its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have know from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy.”
“I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.”
“I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”
“You matter as much as the things that matter to you. And I got so backwards trying to matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.”
“I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.”
“That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.”
“Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. ... Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.”
“We write to discover what we think.”
“Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.”
“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.”
“I realized that I wasn't naturally born to good taste. I understand what it is, but I am happy to wear bright colors. I do have a few items of black clothing, but I think good taste and doing the same thing over and over again is what the whole art world has become.”
“I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too.”
“Everyone thinks that just because you have a Scouse accent, then you must be 'on the rob'.”