/lit/ - Literature

I mean... The world is good enough, based on evidence because I haven't killed myself. Like, if I killed myself... I could say the world is bad, on average.

>>6360941
Here is another

>"When you reach the point of no return, when you have given up all hope, ask yourself if you truly do not care for your life anymore, why have you not proved it but living your life doing whatever you please not what sets you back?
and

>"You're the result of millions and millions of years worth of survival from your ancestors to now, there is no other challenge like continuing that genetic key and surviving through all hardships."

Both of which is what I remind myself when I feel like there is no hope.

>Papa satàn, papa satàn aleppe

>>6360941
With this deceitful nonsense, Sancho suffered hunger, so much so that he secretly cursed his government, and even the person who had given it to him. But with his hunger (and his compote) he began his day on the bench, and the first case before him was a stranger who asked him a question—the steward and the other assistants being present—which was: “Señor, a raging river divided two parts of the same dominion—listen carefully because the case is important and thorny.

“So, then, over this river was a bridge, and on the other side of it there was a gallows and a kind of court set up in which there were usually four judges who administer the law set down by the owner of the river, the bridge, and the dominion. That law read like this: ‘If anyone crosses this bridge from one side to the other, he must swear first where he’s going and why. And if he tells the truth, he should pass, and if he lies, he should be hanged on the gallows without possibility of appeal.’ Many people went over the bridge, and since they all knew the law, it was easy to tell that what they stated was the truth, and the judges let them pass freely.

“It happened, then, that a man swore and said as his oath that he came to die on the gallows, and for no other reason.

“The judges considered the oath and said: ‘If we let this man pass freely he’ll have told a lie in his oath, and should die. And if we hang him, he swore that he came to die on that gallows and he would have told the truth, and for that same reason should be set free.’ We ask your grace, señor governor, what the judges should do with that fellow. Even now they’re still wondering what to do and are quite puzzled. Having heard of your keen intellect, they sent me to beg you to give your opinion on this knotty and uncertain case.”

>>6361987

To which Sancho responded: “Those señores judges who sent you to me shouldn’t have, because I’m a man who is more ignorant than keen-witted. But, even so, explain the matter to me once again so I can understand it. Maybe I’ll be able to «hit the nail on the head».”

The petitioner repeated what he’d said, and repeated it again, then Sancho said: “In my opinion I can set this straight in an instant. Here’s the problem: the man swears he’s going to die on the gallows, and if he dies on the gallows he swore the truth, and by law he should go free, and pass over the bridge; if they don’t hang him, he swore falsely, and by that same law should be hanged.”

“It’s exactly as the señor governor stated,” said the messenger, “and insofar as the complete understanding of the case goes, there’s nothing more to ask or doubt.”

“So I say, then,” replied Sancho, “that the part of the man that spoke the truth be allowed to pass, and the part that told the lie be hanged, and in this way the law regarding passage over the bridge will be followed to the letter.”

“But, señor governor,” replied the petitioner, “to do this we’d have to cut the man into two parts, the lying part and the truthful part, and if he’s cut in half, perforce he has to die, and neither provision of this binding law will be obeyed.”

“Look señor good man,” responded Sancho, “this traveler that you’re talking about, either I’m a blockhead or he has the same reason to die as he does to live and pass over the bridge. If the truth saves him, a lie condemns him. And this being so, as it is, I’m of the opinion that you should tell these señores who sent you to me, since the reasons for condemning him and absolving him balance exactly, they should let him go free, since it’s more praiseworthy to do good rather than bad. And I would sign my name to it if I could write; and in this case I’ve not spoken my own opinion, but rather it was a precept I got, among others, from my master don Quixote the night before I came to be the governor of this island, and which was that when justice hangs in the balance, I should lean toward and favor mercy. And God has ordained that I should think of this right now since it fits the case like a glove.”

“That’s right,” responded the steward, “And I’m of the opinion that Lycurgus, who gave the laws to the Lacedæmonians, could have given no better judgment than the great Panza has given. With this, the morning session stands adjourned, and I’ll give the order that the señor governor should eat as much as he pleases.”

"Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.”

“We come here to tell stories so that we can manage the past without being swallowed by it.”

“When I read I got involved in the words and what they were saying so that I didn't measure the passing of time in typical ways. I was surprised to learn that there was this freedom made of nothing but words. Then I felt like I had missed some crucial point, a long time ago.”

“Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better.”

“I think the reason men liked her was because she gave off high levels of carnality. You looked at her and just knew - this one's up for anything. It's sexy, but you can't really stand it.”
“I’ve found that all weak people share a basic obsession—they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you’d be better off developing a drug habit.”

All from Galveston by the guy who wrote True Detective

“It wasn't the New World that mattered...Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”

Something my father told me a long time ago. He didn't leave me much as he was a simple man but this has always stuck with me.

he said "Son, you know it's possible to become so to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you and if that happens God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways."

>...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

"That life is worth living is the most necessary axiom and, if not assumed, the most impossible conclusion" - Santayana

Really changed me. I'd always grappled with whether life was worth it and I somehow never realized how much better it is to simply assume it is and work from there. Like assuming that two parallel lines do not meet, you do it because if you don't you can't move forward.

>>6362233
the characteristic of them never meeting makes them parallel, not the other way around

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.

>>6362014
I love that one.

In fact that whole chapter is one of my favourites in literature.

Ahab's last words really stuck to me long after I've finished the book. I became calmer, more composed, rarely thought ill of other people, or had any thoughts of vengeance or retribution if they thought ill of me.

>>6362077
You're dad sounds like a wise, man.
Why did he tell you that ? Were you fuckin up ?

>>6362007
I'll have to watch that true detective!!

>>6362014
This.

>>6362077
was your dad black?

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Dubliners - James Joyce

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones..... All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority."

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Runner Up

""What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor."

Karl Marx, Principles of Communism

I lay dying upon the earth with the sword in my body, and raised my
hands to kill the slut of a murderess, but she slipped away from me;
she would not even close my lips nor my eyes when I was dying, for
there is nothing in this world so cruel and so shameless as a woman
when she has fallen into such guilt as hers was.

"i fucked ur mum m8"

anon

>"Dress a goat in silk and it will still remain a goat"

My friend told me this just stayed with me whenever I made friends or when people I knew changed.

>>6363407
Sorry for my ignorance but what is the context of this quote?

>>6360957
that's not to say you won't eventually pile up the evidence to the contrary and kill yourself

>>6360941
>hiding the fact that it's from DBZ
very nice quote tho

>>6363407
'falling faintly / faintly falling' moves me to a melancholy wince every time :'(

>>6363469
read the story, last one in dubliners
>>6363446
Sorry for my ignorance but what is the context of this quote?

>>6360941

>"As for me, all I know is that I know nothing" -Socrates

>"All Communists are dead men on leave. Of this I am aware" -Eugen Levine

>"The state of revolution is the despotism of liberty over tyranny" - Maximilien Robespierre

>"There are no tyrants where there are no slaves." - Jose Rizal

>"Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?" - Maximilien Robespierre

>"Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society." - Vladimir Lenin

>"In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face." - Diogenes of Sinope

>>6363556
that Socrates quote is one of my all time favorites as well.

>>6363496
Yeah I guess that is true. But because I have not done it yet I can't say it is. It is from Tai Pei by the way. That book fucked me up

\/ \/ You guys are going to laugh at this \/ \/

Cips, crunch of my life, fire of my loins. My tongue, my tastebuds. Ch-ips: the tip of the tongue taking a chip of great flavour down the palate to tap, at three, with the teeth. Ch. Ip. S. She was Ch, plain Ch, in the morning, standing --skip this part-----. She was chips in dip.. She was crinkle-cut at school. She was Walkers on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Frito-Lay. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Chips at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial chocolate-pretzel. In a candy story by the sea. Oh when? About as many bits before was chips as my age was that dip. You can always count on a chef for a fancy chip dip . Ladies and gentlemen of the kitchen, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, hungry, gluttonous seraphs, envied. Look at this bent chip

r8 comment + submiss

>>6363556
>"In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face." - Diogenes of Sinope
That is a great quote!

GODDAMN I LOVE BEING WHITE

>>6363629
>Cips
You FUCKED up

A vengeful God has taken all I had,
My health, my strength of will, my air, my sleep,
And only you He's left me by my side -
So He'd be sure I still would pray to Him.

I cried when I first read that and I'm nearly crying again. It's a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev.

>>6363644
I am ashamed

>>6363644
my name has been dishonored

>>6363644
>>6363629
Sure got me laughing at that mistake, didn't bother to read the rest.

"You're right, humans are weak, but we want to live, even if we are being tortured or are wounded" - Guts

Just stuck with me, never forget it for some odd reason.

In the film "Three Colors: Blue," the main character tries to detach from society after losing her husband and child. However, she inadvertently befriends a prostitute/stripper that lives in her apartment building. One day, the stripper calls her from work, crying, and asks her to come talk to her at the strip club. The main character goes to the club, where the stripper tells her that she is upset because she saw her father at the club watching a dance and her boss wouldn't make him leave because he was a "paying customer." Telling the story to a friendly face proves to be cathartic for the stripper, and she begins to feel better. This is the conversation they have after the stripper tells the story (based on my memory of a translation):
Stripper: You saved my life.
Main Character: I did no such thing.
Stripper: I asked you to come and you did - same thing

>>6360941
It's not so much a quote, but the old Taoist tale of the farmer has stuck with me since I was like 15. Here's me paraphrasing it:

There was an old farmer who had his horse run away. All his neighbours who walked by his farm said to him "That is unfortunate." To which he simply replied: "We shall see."

Then, a few days later, the farmer's horse returned with three more wild horses. All his neighbours who passed him said "That is fantastic!" To which he replied: "We shall see."

Then, a few days later, the farmer's son broke his leg trying to ride one of the wild horses. All of his neighbours who saw the farmer said "That is unfortunate." To which the farmer replied: "We shall see."

Then, a few days after, conscription agents from the army came by, and passed on the son because of his injury. All the passing neighbours said to the farmer "That is fantastic!" To which he replied "We shall see."

"Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death."
-Tom Robbins, knowing what's up, as always.

Stop taking yourselves so seriously, guys.

>>6363987
I love this one too, first heard it in Charlie Wilson's War

>>6363987
That is a story behind a Chinese idiom that means "Out of misfortune comes fortune and vice versa"

Anyway

>Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom

>There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.
If everyone read this and believed it, I think the world would be better.

The woman lost her patience.

'And meanwhile what do we eat?' she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel nightshirt. She shook him hard.

It had taken thec olonel seventy-five years - the seventy-five
years of his life, minute by minute - to reach this moment. He felt
pure,explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:'Shit'.

>>6366420
I don't get what this quote is trying to say

>>6363649
Top geg, thats the softest shit I've ever read. Man up pussy

"Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."

''All women are cunts''

-Arthur

>>6366865
Why did you use two apostrophes instead of quotation marks?

>>6366870
Because I'm retarded and I'm used to double tapping the ' '' ' key.

>>6360941

"It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
For I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."
William Ernest Henley, Invictus. That and "Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf" by Thoreau have pretty much always been there in my head when I need extra drive to run, or do whatever.

"The need for a new life becomes apparent. The code of established morality, that which governs the greater number of people in their daily life, no longer seems sufficient. What formerly seemed just is now felt to be a crying injustice. The morality of yesterday is today recognized as revolting immorality. The conflict between new ideas and old traditions flames up in every class of society, in every possible environment, in the very bosom of the family. … Those who long for the triumph of justice, those who would put new ideas into practice, are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous, humanitarian and regenerating ideas cannot take place in a society thus constituted; they perceive the necessity of a revolutionary whirlwind which will sweep away all this rottenness, revive sluggish hearts with its breath, and bring to mankind that spirit of devotion, self-denial, and heroism, without which society sinks through degradation and vileness into complete disintegration."

Kropotkin, The Spirit of Revolt (1880)

>>6363425
Engels wrote Principles of Communism.

>>6368507

It was Marx & Engels. I just forgot about Engels at the time I posted it.

¨If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
f you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
nd treat those two impostors just the same¨
If - Rudyard Kipling.

This one has just stuck with me.

"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent"

it was attributed to Twain when I found it, but the internet does not specify any one particular attribution

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker." --Bakunin

>>6360941
>v
OP, are you talking about Vegeta?

>>6361991
>>6362007
Very good one. I'd have answered that the guy be hanged by his feet for an hour, but that's my cartomancien side speaking :^)

There's that Baudelaire quote I really like. Not sure if this is a favorite, but a good one nonetheless:

"There are in the world, even in the artistic world, people who go to the Louvre museum, go quickly past numerous very interesting, though *second-order*, paintings, without granting them a look, and plant themselves dreamily in front of a Titiano or a Rafaello, one of those that were most popularized by reproduction, and then leave, satisfied, often telling themselves "I know well my museum". There likewise exist people who, having once read Bossuet and Racine, think they grasp the entire history of Litterature.

Fortunately, from time to time righter of wrongs, critics, amateurs, curious people appear, who say that everything is not in Rafaelo, that everything is not in Racine, that the *poeta minores* have some good, some solid, some delightful in them, and that, finally, in loving so much the general beauty expressed by classical poets and artists, one is nonetheless wrong to neglect the particular beauty, the circumstancial beauty and the study of character."

>>6368741
Another one I really like:

"It's a priest of Ate, sent by the Heavens, that the household has fed".

A sentence that sounds well in several languages.

Don't point the gun unless you're prepared to shoot.

>>6360941
This is going to sound really stupid, and trite, but I swear to God one of my favorite quotes is from a TV show, I think it was the 80s HBO series the hitchhiker:

"If you choose to drink from the well of another person's sorrows, don't be surprised when you find that you've fallen in."

That one quote has kept me on the straight & narrow path than my religious upbringing. It's kind of like the cautionary corollary of the Golden Rule.

"'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing."
Philip Roth - The Human Stain

>>6368675
yes, it's what has stuck with me; funny, right?

>>6368600
that's really nice, I don't think my interpretation of it meaning is correct... What's your take on it?

>>6360941
"What has more meaning then your own strength?"

Hit me hard, in the sense that strength could be any attribute that is strong to you or within you. An ability beyond measures in which you seek.

Prove to me there is something with more meaning?

>>6360941
>"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." - Aristole

This logic to me has helped also outside of social experiences.

>>6363987
I first saw this in a children's book of all places.

"For if a person were to select the night in which hissleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this theother days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many daysand nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantlythan this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, buteven the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain;for eternity is then only a single night." -- Socrates, Apology

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.

>>6369421
Also:

>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

-H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu.

As meme-tier as Chtulu is these days, this is an Elder-God tier passage.

>>6362077
Bob Dylan, while accepting an award for something, I can't remember. I believe he got that quotation from somewhere else, though. Beautiful anyway.

>>6360941
>>6360957
>>6360985
these are some of the worst i've seen

>>6363403
kek

GG if you idiots are the future of lit.

>>6360941
>What is the quote which stuck with you throughout life

"If you do that again I'm going to smack you so hard you wont sit down for a week." - My father.

Also, "Get the soap!" Another of my fathers wonderful phrases. IF I ever swore or said anything he didn't like, I had to retrieve the soap from the bathroom for him so he could wash out my mouth.

From a show I watched when I was a teen, one of the characters who is a CIA asked a masked man if he was a "Big Guy" to which he replied.
>"For you"

It's significant because up until I was 23 I had this idea that I was just a "small guy" living in an economy until I realized from this quote that I'm only working to get what I want, the hardest party is knowing what that is.

>>6360941
You sound like an American.

>>6366798
surely you must've played Civ4

"Vooruitgang bestaat niet, en dat is maar goed ook, want zoals het is, is het al erg genoeg."

>>6366448
2deep4u