Pandora > Pandora's Quotes

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“What she needs are stories.
Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“There’s freedom in stories, you know. We read them and we become something else. We imagine different lives, and while we turn the pages, we get to live them. To escape the lot we’re given.”
― Maggie Tokuda-Hall, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea

“But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
― Plato, The Republic

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
― Plato, The Republic

“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”
― Plato, The Republic of Plato

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“I thought I’d solved a problem when really I was creating new ones by taking the path of least resistance.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“We’re either getting better or we’re getting worse.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“Heraclitus, a philosopher born in the Persian Empire back in the fifth century BC, had it right when he wrote about men on the battlefield. “Out of every one hundred men,” he wrote, “ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior…”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.
Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“I love him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who may perish through a minor matter: thus he goes willingly over the bridge. I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his going under. I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the guts of his heart; his heart, however, causes his going under. I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and as heralds they perish.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“You shall love beyond yourselves some day! So first, learn to love. And for that you have to drink the bitter cup of your love.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra