“Then there were so many things to be said that they did not speak of any of them.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf
“Does man not face life with a greater assurance is he believes that a benevolent providence foresees the future? And yet he must at the same time be confident that his will is free, otherwise moral support is meaningless altogether. Doctrines in themselves are not important to me, but their consequences are. For example, I urge upon men that they regard themselves as embodiments of the divine essence. If I convince them, their days are endowed with a sense of abiding significance and unturning glory. Then not all the misfortunes and degradations to which they may be subjected can take from them their feelings of oneness with angels and stars. And as for our people, persecuted and dispersed, they live under the shadow of death, cherishing a dream that is recurrently shattered by the caprice of tyrants and then dreamed again half in despair. What can enable such a people to persist except a conviction of a special relationship to God?”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf
“Stop," she shrieked, "stop trying to make it easier."
"But we do not love each other. We never have..."
"You mean," she screamed, "you have never loved me.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf
“Do you remember, Meir, that epigram quoted in the name of Rabbi Johanan ben Zaccai: 'There is no truth unless there be a faith on which it may rest'? Ironically enough the only sure principle I have achieved is this which I have known almost all my life. And it is so. For all truths rest ultimately on some act of faith, geometry on axioms, the sciences on the assumptions of the objective existence and orderliness of the world of nature. In every realm one must lay down postulates or he shall have nothing at all. So with morality and religion. Faith and reason are not antagonists. On the contrary, salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion and to draw the fullness of their implications. It is not certainty which one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf
“That is the fantastic intolerable paradox of my life, that I have gone questing for what I possessed initially -- a belief to invest my days with dignity and meaning, a pattern of behavior through which man might most articulately express his devotion to his fellows.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf
“because I’ve always noticed that if you speak the truth in a rather silly way nobody believes you. I’ve often done it over contracts. And it’s also a good thing to seem stupider than you are.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Lord Edgware Dies
“Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It's better that way.”
― Jules Verne, quote from From the Earth to the Moon
“How the hell did people do this, this emotion-and-forgiveness thing? How did they stand these feelings? She could barely handle it and she had lovely, necessary, reason-for-living drugs to smooth over the rough spots. How did people do this shit sober?”
― Stacia Kane, quote from City of Ghosts
“Her hands fisted his jacket as she pressed her face to his chest. He didn't touch her in return, stood unmoving, his body tense. "It's not like that," she managed. "I'm not...it's not like I'm... I'm not a whore. I'm not. That's not what... please, please..."
She didn't bother to finish. She was crying to hard to finish anyway, couldn't even bring herself to complete the lie. No, she wasn't whoring herself to Lex for drugs. Technically.
But the drugs were payment for her false loyalty, weren't they? For her betrayal. And she kept seeing him, kept spending the night with him, because he gave them to her. It might not have been the only reason, but it was one of them. She thought she was going to be sick. The one thing she'd sworn she would never do, the one place she'd always said she had too much self respect to go, and here she was. She'd done it.
And she hadn't even noticed.
More gently than she would have expected, his hands found hers and disentangled them from his jacket. He pushed her away, his gaze focused on the ground. He wouldn't even look at her. She was glad. She didn't want him to see her like this.
"Naw," he said. "Naw, Chess, you ain't a whore. A whores's honest.”
― Stacia Kane, quote from Unholy Magic
“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things
Like the Flowing Riv...
A History of God: Th...
The Capture
The Walking Drum
The Melancholy Death...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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