More Book Quotes and Passages
My Book Quotes and Passages list has topped 10,000 words and no longer fits into a single entry. I’ve had to split it into two pages so I could continue adding to it. As of now, the A-P is one the first page and R-Z is on the second. I’m updating continuously so keep checking back. Oh, I also began adding Amazon Affiliate Links so you can purchase the books and I get a small referral fee.
Here, wrote Ziporyn, was a classic sociopath, a man whose huge ego “exists solely to satisfy his own appetite for existence. His answer to the question “What is one allowed to do” is “What one can get away with.” His answer to the question “What is good?” is “What is good for me.”
Robert K. Ressler
Whoever Fights Monsters
“There was morality before the Church; trade before the state; exchange before money; social contracts before Hobbes; welfare before the rights of man; culture before Babylon; society before Greece; self-interest before Adam Smith; and greed before capitalism.”
Ridley, Matt
“In every important way we are secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of a number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable–which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead
I think they must also be a preeminent courage that allows us to be brave–that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that previous things have been put in our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead
“There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent from the newsboy or shoe-shiner at two bucks and peanuts a week and those who take ever new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are shamed, afraid to look back and see where they’ve come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel. Sammy may have had other faults, but he had never been a bore.”
Schulberg, Bud
“It left me sick to think what a tremendous burning and blinding light ambition can be where there is something behind it, and what a puny flickering sparkler when there isn’t. Sammy’s flame was deceptive because you were always looking at it through the powerful magnifying glass of his own ego. But when the telephone wires failed to transmit the magnetic current it was like standing off and looking at a small cold star.”
Schulberg, Bud
“When a moving picture is right, it socks the eye and the ear and the solar plexus all at once and that is a hell of a temptation for any writer. Hollywood may be full of phonies, mediocrities, dictators and good men who have lost their way, but there is something that draws you there that you should not be ashamed of.”
Schulberg, Bud
“I had been waiting for justice to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague; a cancer slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. ”
Schulberg, Bud
“Nothing, to my way of thinking, is better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where is and pass some time in his own company.”
Seneca
Inwardly everything should be different but our outward face should conform with the crowd. Our clothes should not be gaudy, yet they should not be dowdy either. We should not keep silver plate with inlays of solid gold but at the same time we should not imagine that doing without gold and silver is proof that we are leading the simple life. Let our aim be a way of life not diametrically opposed to, but better than that of the mob. Otherwise we shall repel and alienate the very people whose reform we desire; we shall make them, moreover, reluctant to imitate us in anything for fear they may have to imitate us in everything.
Seneca
‘What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend.’
Seneca
There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. I shall send you, accordingly, the actual books themselves, and to save you a lot of trouble hunting all over the place for passages likely to be of use to you, I shall mark the passages so that you can turn straight away to the words I approve and admire.”
Seneca
“Count your years and you’ll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day–that your faults die before you do.”
Seneca
He should be delivering himself of such sayings, not memorizing them. It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have wisdom deriving solely from his notebook. ‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said? ‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others? Assume authority over yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.
Seneca
Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one who is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman’, a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. And there is no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
Seneca
They are begging you to extricate them from this awful vortex, to show them in their doubt and disarray the shining torch of truth. Tell them what nature made necessary and what she had made superfluous. Tell them how simple are the laws she had laid down and how straight forward and enjoyable life is or those who follow them and confused and disagreeable it is for other who put more trust in popular ideas than they do in nature.
Seneca
Wouldn’t you think a man an utter fool if he burst into tears because he didn’t live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding tears because he isn’t going to be alive a thousand years from now.
Seneca
You want to live–but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying–and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different than being dead?
Seneca
As it is with a play, so it is with life–what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you top. Stop wherever you will–only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.
Seneca
In the meantime cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity and always take full not of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do.
Seneca
Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired and openly wish–a lie–for death.
Seneca
Let me indicate here how men can prove that their words are their own: let them put their preaching into practice.
Seneca
We are attracted by wealth, pleasures, good looks, political advancement and various other welcoming and enticing prospects: we are repelled by exertion, death, pain, disgrace and limited means. It follows that we need to train ourselves not to crave for the former and not to be afraid of the latter. Let us fight the battle the other way round–retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the thing that actually attack us.
Seneca
No man’s good by accident. Virtue has to be learnt. Pleasure is a poor and petty thing. No value should be set on it: it’s something we share with dumb animals–the minutes, most insignificant creatures scutter after it. Glory’s an empty, changeable thing, as fickle as the weather. Poverty’s no evil to anyone unless he kicks against it. Death is not an evil.
Seneca
“Occasionally I wondered if these girls ever took time to be out by themselves and reflect, apart from their girlfriends. They swarmed in clusters on the quad, in the coffe shop and in the dorm–piling in threes and fours onto a single bed and laughing at all the crazy stuff they’d done that day. They sent instant messages to each other on the computer and text-messaged each on their cell-phones a dozen times a day. They’d go on Facebook…”
Sessions Stepp, Laura
“Crime once exposed had no refuge but in audacity.”
Tacitus
“She would reproach the emperor with incessant vituperation and sometimes call him in jest a mere war who was under the rule of others, and was so far from having empire that he had not even his own liberty.”
Tacitus
“My being able to meet your elaborate speech with an instant rejoinder is, I consider, primarily your gift, for you taught me how to express myself not only after reflection but at a moments notice.”
Tacitus
“I will repeated this point again until I get hoarse: A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact but in light of the information until that point.”
Fooled By Randomness
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas
“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip– the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted”
Thompson, Hunter S.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“I hate to say this” said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry Go Round bar on the second balcony “but this place is getting to me. I think I’m getting the Fear”
“Nonsense ” I said. “we came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we’re right in the vortex you want to quit.” I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “You must realize” I said “that we’ve found the main nerve.”
“I know he said. “That’s what gives me the Fear”
Thompson, Hunter S.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“The face that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.” Saul Alinsky as quoted by
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell’s Angels.
“To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old “individualist” tradition “that made this country great” is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are-not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment…and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon that will shortly become extinct now that it’s been called to the attention of the police”
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell’s Angels.
“No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud dramatic forms that both he and community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it.” Frank Tannenbaum Crime and Community as quoted
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell’s Angels.
The Angels don’t like to being called losers but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah I guess I am, said one. “but you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out”
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell’s Angels.
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” Dr Johnson as quoted by
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell’s Angels.
“Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free and freedom depends on being courageous.
-Pericles
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“If one has a free choice and can live undisturbed, it is sheer folly to go to war. But suppose the choice was forced on one–submission and immediate slavery or danger with the hope of survival: then I prefer the man who stands up to danger rather the one who runs aware from it. As for me, I am the same as I was, and do not alter; it is you who have changed.”
-Pericles
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“So long as poverty forces men to be bold, so long as insolence and pride of wealth nourish their ambitions, and in other accidents of life they are continually dominated by some incurable master passion or another, so long will their impulses drive them into danger.”
-Diodtus
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“That war is an evil is something which we all know, and it would be pointless to go on cataloguing all the disadvantages involved in it.”
-Hemocrates
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“When we went to war in the first place we all, no doubt, had the idea of furthering our own private interests, and we have the same idea now that we are attempting, by a process of claims and counter claims, to arrange a settlement. And if things do not work out so that everyone goes away with what he considers his due, then no doubt we shall go to war again.”
-Hemocrates
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“For it is more disgraceful, at least for those who have a name to lose, to gain one’s endsby deceit which pretends to be morality than by open violence. Straightforward aggression has a certain justification in the strength that is given to us by fortune”
-Brasidas
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“But success goes to the man who sees more clearly when the enemy is making mistakes like this and who, making the most of his own forces, does not attack on obvious and recognized lines, but in the way that best suits the actual situation. And it is by these unorthodox methods that one wins the greatest glory; they completely deceive the enemy, and are of the greatest possible service to one’s own side.”
-Brasidas
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“Then, too, when people attack their neighbors in a spirit of great confidence of their own strength–as is the case with the Athenians now–they usually march all the more boldly against an enemy who makes no move against them and only defends himself on his own ground, but when they find someone who comes out to meet them outside his own frontiers and who will, if the occasion arises, take the initiative in attack, they are not so ready to come to grips.”
Pagondas
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“This is the safe rule–to stand up to one’s equals, to behave with deference towards one’s superiors, and to treat one’s inferiors with moderation.”
-The Athenians
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“This is the way we’ve won our empire, and this is the way all empires have been won–by coming vigorously to help of all who ask for it, irrespective of whether they are Hellenes or not. One does not only defend oneself against a superior power when one is attacked; one takes measures in advance to prevent the attack materializing.”
-Alcibiades
Thucydides.
History of the Peloponnesian War
“When a True Genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Jonathan Swift- “Thoughts on various subjects, moral and diverting”
Toole, John Kennedy
Confederacy of Dunces
We started talking about what it feels like to be young and have ability. You feel like you’re going insane, and you’re always afraid of empty or quiet rooms for the flashes of nebulous shit buzzing around you. You never feel truly alone. There is whispering in your ear and you can’t tell anyone about it. You never have control over the energy around you and no one else even knows its there, and when you slip into sleep its with white knuckles and sweat because the things you see on that plane between your eyes and the rest of the world are getting clearer every day. But like any fear, with age it dissipates.
Tyler, Erin Leigh
The Bunny Blog
Whoever reads history with a mind free from prejudice cannot ail to arrive at a conviction that of all military virtues, energy in the conduct of operations has always contributed the most to the glory and the success of arms.
Von Clausewitz
But war is no pastime; no mere passion for venturing and winning; no work of a free enthusiasm, it is a serious means for a serious object.
Von Clausewitz
The reason of this is, that we do not gain all our experience at once, but by degrees; thus our determinations continue to be assailed incessantly by fresh experience; and the mind, if we may use the expression, must always be ‘under arms.’
Von Clausewitz
Firm reliance on self must make him proof against the seeming pressure of the moment; his first conviction will in the end prove true, when the foreground scenery which fate has pushed on to the stage of war, with its accompaniment of terrific objects, is drawn aside and the horizon extended. This is one of the great chasms, which separate conception from execution.
Von Clausewitz
Therefore, far from making it our aim to gain upon the enemy by complicated plans, we must rather seek to be beforehand with him by greater simplicity in our designs.
Von Clausewitz
In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the heads of the people. As idealistic as that sounded, he followed with the even more practical advice that even though the Mongol Empire should be one, the subject people should never be allowed to unite as one. “People conquered on different sides of the lake should be ruled on different sides of the lake”
Weatherford, Jack
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
What the hell happened to all these songs of the rich in Wally’s generation, these well-brought-up boys who went off to private schools? These damned schools were producing a new kind of scion of the elite: a boy utterly world-weary by the age of sixteen, cynical, phlegmatic and apathetic around adults, although perfectly respectful and maddeningly polite, a boy inept at sports, averse to hunting and fishing and riding horses or handling animals in any way, a boy embarrassed by his advantages, desperate to hide them, eager to dress in backward baseball caps and homey pants and other ghettos rags, terrified of being envied, a boy facing the world without any visible signs of the joy of living and without…balls…
Wolfe, Tom
The bank might end up ruining Croker, wiping him out utterly or it might not. But one thing the bank couldn’t change. The bank couldn’t change history. There was no rewriting the fact that Charlie Croker was a man who had come from out of nowhere and built up an empire. The empire might crumble and disappear. But so what? So did Napoleon’s. Who does the world remember and respect? Croker had something that [he] Raymond Peepgass did not possess–or, rather, something he had never been willing to let off the leash…A certain red dog. Every man had that red dog inside him, but only real men dared let him loose.
Wolfe, Tom
Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it”
Wolff, Tobias
All of Dwight’s complaints against me had the aim of giving me a definition of myself. They succeeded but not in the way he wished. I defined myself by opposition to him. In the past I had been ready, even when innocent, to believe any evil thing of myself. Now that I had grounds for guilt I could no longer feel them”
Wolff, Tobias
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
Wolff, Tobias
“When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever”
Wolff, Tobias
“To be a writer was to escape the problems of blood and class. Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege–the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it.”
Wolff, Tobias
“Don’t tell me about science Frost said. I’m something of a scientist myself. Bet you didn’t know that. Botany. You boys know what tropism is, it’s what makes a plant grow towards the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it–you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science cant–what was your word? dim?–science can’t dime that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home”
Wolff, Tobias
“I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desire–nothing between me and greatness itself–but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to the counsels of moderation, expedience and conventional morality, and shrink into the long slow death of respectability.”
Wolff, Tobias
“It is not for the conquerors to surrender their arms…”
Xenophon
“The only things of value which we have at present are our arms and out courage. So long as we keep our arms we fancy that we can make good use of our courage; but if we surrender our arms we shall lose our lives as well.”
Xenophon
“If anyone did him a good or an evil turn, he evidently aimed at going one better Some people used to refer to an habitual prayer of his, that he might life long enough to be able to repay with interest both those who had helped him and those who had injured him. It was quite natural then that he was the one man in our times to whom so man people were eager to hand over their money, their cities and their own persons.”
Xenophon
“This seems to me to be the record of a man who was devoted to war. He could have lived in peace without incurring any reproaches or any harm, but he chose to make war. He could have lived a life of ease, but he preferred a hard life with warfare. He could have had money and security but he chose to make the money he had less by engaging in war. Indeed, he liked spending money on war just as one might spend it on love affairs or any other pleasure. All this shows how devoted he was to war.”
Xenophon
“You are well aware that it is not numbers or strength that bring the victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods’ gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them. I have noticed this point too, my friends, that in soldiering the people whose one aim is to keep alive usually find a wretched and dishonorable death, while the people who, realizing that death is the common lot of all men, make it their endeavor to die with honor, somehow seem more often to reach old age and to have a happier life when they are alive. ”
Xenophon
“But by night the Greek practice is for the slowest part of the army to be in front. This way the army is least likely to lose cohesion, and men are least likely to stray off from each other without knowing where they are. When a force loses cohesion, it often happens that detachments fall foul of each other and, through mutual ignorance, damage is done on both sides.”
Xenophon
“Now in my view it is more painful and a more dishonorable thing to fail to hold all these conquests than it would be never to have won them; just as it is harder to sink into poverty from riches than never to have been rich in the first place, and more painful to appear as an ordinary person after have been a king than to have never been king at all. ”
Xenophon
Heraclides, no doubt, thinks that there is nothing serious in life compared with acquiring money by every means possible. I, on the other hand, consider that there are no nobler and more brilliant possessions that a man, and particularly a man who holds power, can have than honor and fair dealing and generosity. A man who has these is rich in the possession of many friends and rich in the fact that many others want to become friends of his. If he is successful, he has other people who will share in his happiness; and if things go wrong with him, he is in no lack of people to come and help him.
Xenophon
The first Wolfe quote is a depressingly accurate description of our cohort.