“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Never offend an enemy in a small way.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“How hungrily we read about ourselves!”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Since nothing is free, to each his price.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“There are, then, three sorts of religious experiences. The ancient rites, which are essentially propitiatory. The mysteries, which purge the soul and allow us to glimpse eternity. And philosophy, which attempts to define not only the material world but to suggest practical ways to the good life, as well as attempting to synthesize (as Iamblichos does so beautifully) all true religion in a single comprehensive system.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“That's why Priscus is wisest of all: silence cannot be judged. Silence masks all things or no thing. Only Priscus can tell us what his silence conceals, but since he won't, we suspect him great.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich detail every folly and wickedness of which man is capable, enameled with manners and gilded with hypocrisy.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“They say that to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is fully calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“After all, as educated men, we should realize that myths always stand for other things. They are toys for children teething. The man knows that the toy horse is not a true horse but merely suggests the idea of a horse to a baby's mind. When we pray before the statue of Zeus, though the statue contains him as everything must, the statue is not the god himself but only a suggestion of him. Surely, as fellow priests, we can be frank with one another about these grown-up matters.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Like the rest of us, Constantius was many men in the body of one.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
“Wo immer ein Thron ist, findet man in reicher Auswahl jede Torheit und jede Bosheit, deren der Mensch fähig ist, poliert mit guten Manieren und vergoldet mit Heuchelei.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Julian
Gore Vidal
Born place: in West Point, New York, The United States
Born date October 3, 1925
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“sounds. Must be the sea. Might even come”
― J.P. Donleavy, quote from The Ginger Man
“At all times a heavy ceramic casserole would sit on a pale blue Aga, so should people drop in unexpectedly, I could wander out in my bare feet, welcome them warmly, give them dinner, then press my home-made elderberry wine on them. I would be like Nigella Lawson.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“at high enough energy and temperature—such as occurred a mere fraction of a second after the big bang—electromagnetic and weak force fields dissolve into one another, take on indistinguishable characteristics, and are more accurately called electroweak fields.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
“Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Robots of Dawn
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Hotel WorldBookQuoters 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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