"One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival."

Ozick, Cynthia on writers and writing   

"I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant."

Proust, Marcel on creativity
4 fans of this quote   

"The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent."

Orwell, George on books - reading
3 fans of this quote   

"The Trojans lost the war because they fell for a really dumb trick. hey, there's a gigantic wooden horse outside and all the Greeks have left. Let's bring it inside! Not a formula for long-term survival. Now if they had formed a task force to study the Trojan Horse and report back to a committee, everyone wouldn't have been massacred.. Who says middle management is useless?"

Engst, Adam C. on management   

"There is an urgent need -- in fact a national survival need -- for invigorating intellectual life, for upgrading the general regard for intellectual excellence. The United States must experience an intellectual renaissance or it will experience defeat. The time cannot be far off -- if indeed it is not already here -- when the strength of a nation, measured in terms of any kind of world competition, will depend less on the number of its bombs than on the number of its learned men."

Roper, Elmo on power   

"We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale -- identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual."

Cooley, Charles Horton on diversity   

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

Baldwin, James on identity
4 fans of this quote   

"Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up."

Paglia, Camille on mothers   

"We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization"

Arbiter, Gauis Petronius on opportunity
4 fans of this quote   

"A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose-and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredible unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours."

Buscaglia, Leo on uniqueness
16 fans of this quote   

"Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say."

Miller, Henry on hope
5 fans of this quote   

"One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on time
6 fans of this quote   

"For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities --a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces --a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life."

Eliot, George on illusion
3 fans of this quote   

"People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations."

Herzen, Alexander on illusion   

"Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad."

Conrad, Joseph on loneliness
10 fans of this quote   

"Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend... when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present -- love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure -- the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth."

Breathnach, Sarah Ban on gratitude
3 fans of this quote   

"Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war and until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war."

Selassie, Haile on racism   

"The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still than its cost -- for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department."

Carnegie, Andrew on competition   

"What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams."

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro on life
6 fans of this quote   

"How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!"

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth on youth
33 fans of this quote   

"Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover."

Dworkin, Andrea on love
8 fans of this quote   

"From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own."

Schurz, Carl on right and rightness   

"Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind."

Einstein, Albert on humankind
3 fans of this quote   

"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him."

Brooks, Mel on writers and writing
9 fans of this quote   

"An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes."

Baldwin, James on identity   

"In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity."

Paglia, Camille on gender
3 fans of this quote   

"There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!"

Montessori, Maria on language   

"Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a work of man."

Mccarthy, Mary on work   

"When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity. We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group."

Thomas, Lewis on committees and meetings   

"Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I am here, a mind and a body. To say there's no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer."

Rossner, Judith on identity   

"The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage."

May, Rollo on courage
3 fans of this quote   

"We realize our dilemma goes deeper than shortage of time; it is basically a problem of priorities. We confess, We have left undone those things that ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

Hummel, Charles E. on time   

"We once worried that democracy could not survive if an undereducated populace knew too little. Now we worry if it can survive us knowing too much."

Bianco, Robert on democracy   

"One may survive distress, but not disgrace."

Proverb, Scottish on honor
3 fans of this quote   

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

Einstein, Albert on miracles
16 fans of this quote   

"Learning is not compulsory but neither is survival."

Deming, W. Edwards on learning
9 fans of this quote   

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

Lewis, C. S. on friends and friendship
19 fans of this quote   

"Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard."

Poe, Edgar Allan on gentlemen   

"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."

Vaneigem, Raoul on work
3 fans of this quote   

"Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas."

Mencken, H. L. on choice
3 fans of this quote