Quotes from Everyone Burns

“As someone once said, SINCERITY is the single most important human characteristic. So once you can fake THAT, you're made.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“I would be a fully-paid-up member of the 'I Hate Paperwork Club' if I could summon the enthusiasm to fill in the application form.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it; or because it is in your traditions; or because many speak about it; or because it is found in your religious books; or because your teachers and elders believe it; or because you have become attached to it from habit.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“We always have choices in life. It is simply a question of deciding whether we can live with the consequences of our choices.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“How often – I continue reflecting – is it that we see what we want to see, rather than what is really before our eyes. In the trade we call this confirmation bias, and our brains are riddled with it. We take a position on something and thereafter only see whatever confirms that position, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Some people are straightforward. What you see is indeed what you get. Their words have no subtext and their hearts are open. Such individuals possess a naïveté which is both striking and humbling, and which inspires trust in others because these people are themselves trusting. They see life essentially through childlike eyes and, because of that, the more cynical members of the human race often consider them foolish and unsophisticated. Those more experienced in the ways of the world view them as easy marks, such stuff as the con-man’s wet dreams are made on.
Straightforward people are very much in the minority, and in today’s world where idealism has become unfashionable and the concept of self-sacrifice unfathomable, they are in all likelihood an endangered species.
For the rest of us, lying and deception is a necessary social skill. One we practice every day. Those – like myself – suckled at the breast of Perfidious Albion especially see the public expression of vulnerability as anathema. We harbour an abhorrence for emotional weakness; and we Brits are by no means the only ones. On a dog-eat-dog planet if you are to thrive, you have to be in control of yourself. Or at least appear to be.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“How I love Bangkok! It’s so teeming with everything that should be forbidden. I’m not just talking about the sex trade. I also mean the ways of driving, the ways of putting up buildings, environmental management arrangements, the continual attention of con artists and snatch-thieves, and the quaint local custom of peeing in side-streets.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Karma means ‘action’. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“I love Samui in the wee small hours. I especially love it on nights like this when the white moon stares down from the blackness like the pockmarked eye of a blind god. At such times, when the island’s bright signs have paled to grey and the broom of sleep has swept the revellers to their beds, my mind’s cynical crust cracks open a little, and some fanciful poetry leaks in. Then the dark hills appear to me as slumbering prehistoric leviathans, the clouds assume the air of restless ghosts, and the moon-dusted sea murmurs in some long forgotten tongue of the divine.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Despite the perturbations of the world, life goes on.
The sky presents an endless canopy of translucent blue. The still air is suffused with sunshine.
Perhaps tomorrow the beneficent clouds will gather and it will finally rain. The earth will cool and revive and in that seminal moment all our sins perchance will be washed away.
It might happen.
But somehow I doubt it.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man’s breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“The subconscious mind, like the Good Lord, can work in a mysterious way, and mine has been known to work in a way that is completely unintelligible, if not downright barmy.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“How can there be laughter, how can there be pleasure, when the whole world is burning? When you are in deep darkness, will you not ask for a lamp?” Lord Buddha, The Dhammapada”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“There is a saying about having the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“The longer you go on playing a role, the more it becomes you: and one day you wake up and discover you are in fact the person you have been pretending to be.”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

“She looks doubtful, but is too polite to say anything. “Anyway, thanks”
― John Dolan, quote from Everyone Burns

About the author

Popular quotes

“I watch her duck into the building, a cavern in my chest so huge, I'm sure my next breath will flip me inside out.”
― Ashley Herring Blake, quote from Suffer Love

“I'd been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I've been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City's got a few, and Chicago's got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn't give them a lot of options. The details are different - some of 'em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling.”
― Ben H. Winters, quote from Underground Airlines

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“esse querido plano interior; o segredo da felicidade é não termos escrúpulos para connosco e termos o máximo de atenções para com todos os outros; de resto, o próprio tempo disse já adeus a todos os piratas da alma”
― Stig Dagerman, quote from De dömdas ö

“We fail to reckon with the reality of human nature. By nature,we are egocentric. Our world revolves around us. None of us is totally altruistic.”
― Gary Chapman, quote from The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.