Zitat des Tages über Voltaire:
Yes, the meeting of dear friends atones for the regret of separation; and like it so much enhances affection, that after absence one wonders how one has been able to stay away from them so long.
The experience of ages has shown that a man who works on the land is purer, nobler, higher, and more moral... Agriculture should be at the basis of everything. That's my idea.
Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth.
It is better to learn late than never.
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
You don't have to fight for your life anymore. You're starting a new one.
I love the mixture that's in me. It makes me me. And that's why it's such a shame that people waste energy in denying who they are.
For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.
In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.
It was really tiring always pretending to be someone else. Not my life, not my real name, nothing.
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
We do not praise others, ordinarily, but in order to be praised ourselves.
Take care that no one hates you justly.
I am not going to participate in professional politics again.
A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.
If, in the coming thousand years, a feminine culture shall really supplement the masculine, then this will be exactly in the measure in which women have the courage to create and to act as most feminists now do not even dare think.
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
Facebook has gone from a nice-and-boring social network to becoming an identity layer of the web. It is where nearly a billion people are depositing the artifacts of civilization in the 21st century - photos, videos, and birthday wishes.
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
Tunisia's responsibility, and especially that of its political and intellectual elites, is enormous. All the protagonists of the nation's social, cultural, economic and political life must work to overcome useless and counterproductive polarisation, and to find solutions to domestic, regional and international problems.
For yesterday and for all tomorrows, we dance the best we know.
The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes.
Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
I've always loved writing, and the impulse for me is storytelling. I don't sit down and think: 'What political message can I sell?' I love the creativity of it.
Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.
My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.
When I look at something, it is certain that for an instant I am one with what I see.
It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.
Politics has become entertainment.
To do two things at once is to do neither.