Quotes
August 3, 2026This page is not actively maintained. It is an archive, kept as it was.
Same story as the book reviews: I had a short stint with Goodreads and then decided to abandon it. These are the quotes I marked as favourites while I was there, moved here so they live on my own site instead.
The export they came from had no authors attached, so I have put the names back myself. Where a line is famous mostly because it has been passed around, I have said so.
Ernest Hemingway#
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Usually credited to Hemingway, but it almost certainly belongs to the sportswriter Red Smith.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
I drink to make other people more interesting.
All thinking men are atheists.
Never confuse movement with action.
You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Leo Tolstoy#
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina
Boredom: the desire for desires.
Anna Karenina
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
War and Peace
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
Karl Marx#
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
Theses on Feuerbach. The same words are inscribed on his grave.
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
The Civil War in France
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
Hunter S. Thompson#
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a ride!”
Attached to Thompson for decades, though it has never been found in anything he wrote.
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
Good people drink good beer.
Che Guevara#
Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am, only one of a different sort: one who risks his skin to prove his truths.
Be realistic, demand the impossible!
I would rather die standing up than live life on my knees.
Older than Che. Emiliano Zapata and Dolores Ibárruri both said versions of it first.
The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.
Nadine Gordimer#
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
The facts are always less than what really happened.
A desert is a place without expectation.
Mircea Eliade#
Ai fost un prost. Nu trebuia s-o visezi, trebuia s-o iubești.
La țigănci
Charles Bukowski#
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
Mark Twain#
Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.
W. C. Fields#
I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.
Isaac Asimov#
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Foundation
Mahatma Gandhi#
Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
The sentiment is his, the wording is not. It is a paraphrase that grew in circulation long after his death.
Unattributed#
One quote in the export I could not trace to anyone, and I would rather leave it open than guess:
To have solely one thought, but for it to be capable of destroying the universe.
It sits between the Eliade quote and the rest, and reads like a translation from Romanian, so Cioran is the obvious suspect. I could not find the source to confirm it.