Blaise Pascal

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

If we look at our work immediately after completing it, we are still too involved; if too long afterwards, we cannot pick up the thread again.

I cannot imagine a man without thought; he would be a stone or an animal.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them. A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it down. I write instead, that it has escaped me.

Two errors: 1. To take everything literally. 2. To take everything spiritually.

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference...

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

Jonathan Swift 

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.

A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

Every dog must have his day.

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.

My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

Jimi Hendrix

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?

I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.

We want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... 'Cause there are so many sleeping people.

I got a bad, bad feeling my baby don't live here no more...
But that's alright I still got my guitar.

Have you ever been experienced?
Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.

Purple haze, all in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same,
Acting funny, but I don't know why,
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.

Albert Camus

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

There are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.

Dmitri Mendeleev

We must expect the discovery of many as yet unknown elements-for example, elements analogous to aluminum and silicon- whose atomic weight would be between 65 and 75.

Certain characteristic properties of elements can be foretold from their atomic weights.

Elements which are similar as regards their chemical properties have atomic weights which are either of nearly the same value (eg. Pt, Ir, Os) or which increase regularly (eg. K, Ru, Cs).

The magnitude of the atomic weight determines the character of the element, just as the magnitude of the molecule determines the character of a compound body.

It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.

No law of nature, however general, has been established all at once; its recognition has always been preceded by many presentiments.

Pleasures flit by - they are only for yourself; work leaves a mark of long-lasting joy, work is for others.

The elements which are the most widely diffused have small atomic weights.

The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weights, exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties.

We could live at the present day without a Plato, but a double number of Newtons is required to discover the secrets of nature, and to bring life into harmony with the laws of nature.

Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.

Failure too is a form of death.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time.

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

Charles Baudelaire

You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold.

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.1855

There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams

The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.

Philip Roth

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Life is water, dancing to the tune of macromolecules.

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.

A vitamin is a substance that makes you ill if you don't eat it.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.

Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money.

The foodstuff, carbohydrate, is essentially a packet of hydrogen, a hydrogen supplier, a hydrogen donor, and the main event during its combustion is the splitting off of hydrogen.

When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul.