Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Salman Rushdie
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
John Ruskin
Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.
Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.
When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
Out of suffering comes the serious mind; out of salvation, the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance faith.
No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.
Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
Freedom is only granted us that obedience may be more perfect.
Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
You cannot get anything out of nature or from God by gambling; only out of your neighbor.
You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.
Give little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments.
Nathaniel Emmons
I could never think well of a man's intellectual or moral character, if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments.
Whatever separates you from the Truth, throw it away, it will vanish anyhow.
Yumus Emre
According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.
Harry Enfield
The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
Sigmund Z. Engel
It is better to be silent, and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Silvan Engel
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Friedrich Engels
People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of societythe taking possession of the means of production in the name of societythis is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not abolished. It dies out.
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