"Sometimes I feel like I'm just like a boat,
upon a winding river,
twisting towards an endless black sea,
further and further drifting away,
from where I want to be,
who I want to be."
Life is basically like a soap bubble. It rides on the wind, flying here and there… and before you realize it - pop! It's gone. When it's about to disappear, you think that you could've flown a little higher. But by the time, it's already too late.
Work hard, study well and eat and sleep plenty. That's the Turtle Hermit way to learn.
"Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart."
"You're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
"In this day, he would have been a professor, in that age, he was a tutor."
"The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea..."
But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.
"I'm being annoying", I said. "You're not being annoying," she said, but it's extremely hard to believe someone when they tell you that.
It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life.
"But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"
But still, in the office, whenever he had cleaned his typewriter or changed the ribbon and wished to test the machine, the sentence he always wrote was: "At the age of thirty-three, when he was alread the father of four children..."
“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”
“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
I would prefer not to.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
The unexamined life is not worth living, man.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
“They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
"And what difference does that make?”
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.
And all of a sudden I'm relatively sane
With everything to lose and nothing to gain
Or something like that
When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
I can illustrate the second approach with the same image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy which came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months – when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!
A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration… the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it… yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance.
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensation for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t so nearly as spectacular as instability. And being contended has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;