/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2283602]

ITT:

Your favourite quote.
>Bonus: In one paragraph, explain it affects you.

Mine:
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Elliot

>I find this profoundly philosophical and when I heard it it made perfect sense. Everytime I read it I think of Plato, and how all knowledge is inate and just needs to be unlocked - i.e. why they call it "research". Very profound and beautifully worded.

[Anonymous No.2283603]

"Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"

[Anonymous No.2283607]

"'It was the best of times, it was the "blurst" of times'?!? You stupid monkey!"

[Anonymous No.2283613]

"I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law."

>Aristotle

[Anonymous No.2283615]

"Hodor" Said Hodor.

[Anonymous No.2283616]

>>2283607
haha, cool gag

[Aватар No.2283617]

>What mattered was to humble himself, to organise his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.


>I know what kind of life I'd have. I wouldn't make an experiment out of my life.I would be the experiment of my life. Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young, I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it's living only in so far you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the me for everyone.

[Anonymous No.2283625]

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior.

Murder kills only the individual-and, after all, what is an individual? We can make a new one with the greatest ease-as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.

[Aватар No.2283627]

>"Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw. He rolled (using brown bag paper) what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea. It was huge. Dean stared at it, popeyed. Victor lit it and casually passed it around. To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling. It blew into your throat in one great blast of heat. We held our breaths and all let out simultaneously. Instantly, we were all high."

[Anonymous No.2283628]

>>2283625
-and, after all, what is a society?

[Anonymous No.2283632]

>The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes; because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. Richard Nixon.

[Anonymous No.2283639]

“…The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellaheen Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya…to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore – they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.' And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.”

[Anonymous No.2283653]

More of a passage but it has stuck with me since I first read it. Kinda simple but I love the way the wording.

>He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don't want, we may sweep away.

[Anonymous No.2283658]

>T. S. Elliot
>T. S. Elliot
>T. S. Elliot
>T. S. Elliot
>T. S. Elliot
>T. S. Elliot
>T. S. Elliot

The horror! The horror!

[Anonymous No.2283660]

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

read it on Civ 4, stuck with me ever since...

[Anonymous No.2283664]

>>2283660
Baseless assertion that we apparently owe something to generations that don't exist yet. It's at the centre on the UN's conception of sustainable development. it sounds noble and humbling but there is nothing to suggest that we should see ourselves only as a means an end (the end being the next generation). personally, I despise any hint of the idea that my life is only made meaningful by reproduction and working towards future civilisation. it's just not true and it's inconsistent with what we know about progress and the state of the universe. If it were true, then how do we respond to the face that the human species will undoubtedly cease to exist (whether by disease, conflict, supernova or universe expansion to inhospitable levels). Does the inevitability of the species' demise invariably mean that our lives right now are (by nature of being a means, a method of getting to some eventual state that won't last) meaningless? Of course not. Meaning has nothing to do with potential.

[Anonymous No.2283669]

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.”

[Anonymous No.2283670]

>>2283664

It's all perspective. I think on a fundemental level the whole purpose of life is to continue your line, that's the basic drive. When one comes "above" that basic drive, meaning can be found in many, many other things.

[Anonymous No.2283700]

>“No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
>-Socrates

Holy shit if I ever feel lazy and not keen for something I just recite this in my head and its on.

[Anonymous No.2283717]

>>2283669

[ϟ Ｋ Ｏ Ｚ ϟ !Ry9qSW42No No.2283727]

[Anonymous No.2283738]

Fuck yeah quote thread.

"He was tough and resilient, a man who dealt uncomplainingly with adversities, who ate everything life threw at him, spit out what he did not like, and used the rest to make himself stronger."

this is the type of man I wanna be.

[Anonymous No.2283745]

>>2283700
Now i wannago work out

[Anonymous No.2283746]

>>2283745
I want to go work out*

[Anonymous No.2283772]

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

It's always stuck in my head since I read it as a kid.

[Anonymous No.2283787]

>
"The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:- against whom, against whom?" - All Quiet On The Western Front

>Everything comes full circle. No matter what you believe, no matter what you lose, no matter what you experience, in the end we're all together.

[Anonymous No.2283800]

"If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them."
c. 1770. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Baron_d%27Holbach

[Anonymous No.2283827]

>Stephen Fry

"incuriosity is the oddest and the most foolish failing there is"

"Picture a world as being a city whose pavements are covered a foot deep in gold coins. You have to wade through them to make progress. Their clinking and rattling fills the air, Imagine that you met a beggar in such a city."

On knowldege

[Anonymous No.2283835]

"As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. 'The artery's gone,' I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting - I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done suits me so well"

Orwell

I read it and thought, yeah the world is fucking great man

[Anonymous No.2283836]

"Yeah? You wanna fuck me like a fucking whore? You want me to be a fucking whore. Yeah I'm a fucking whore. What you gonna do, fuck me?"

-Sasha Grey

[Anonymous No.2283841]

"It's all very well living with a horse that talks, but a friend who floats in the air becomes of necessity an object of suspicion." - jean cocteau, orphee

[Anonymous No.2283908]