Boris Pasternak

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ... he whispered to himself — the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel.

Even so, one step from my grave,
I believe that cruelty, spite,
The powers of darkness will in time
Be crushed by the spirit of light.

William Styron

This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.

Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true!

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

Her [Sophie] thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. … One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

Ernest Rutherford

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.

When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life.

I must confess it was very unexpected and I am very startled at my metamorphosis into a chemist.

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in which new types of matter are being continually produced. . . . The conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic in character.

I came into the room which was half-dark and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience, and realised that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the Earth, where my views conflicted with his.
To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me.
Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the Earth, provided no new source [of heat] was discovered. That prophetic utterance referred to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy beamed upon me.

Anton Chekhov

People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.

Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.  

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

Franz Kafka

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous bedbug.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it?

There is hope, but not for us.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Evil is whatever distracts.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Elie Wiesel

If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.

What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.Elie Wiesel Circled--Buchenwald Concentration Camp

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.

Frank Zappa

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

Angelina Jolie

All women do have a different sense of sexuality, or sense of fun, or sense of like what's sexy or cool or tough.

And my dad, you're a great actor but you're a better father.  

I always play women I would date.

I am odd-looking. I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet.

I didn't really want to live, so anything that was an investment in time made me angry... but also I just felt sad. When the hopelessness is hurting you, it's the fixtures and fittings that finish you off.

I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person, and don't judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free.

I don't see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I'm skinny, as if that's supposed to make me happy.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I'm walking down the street.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It's like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I'd like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

Tom Lehrer

All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

I'd like to take you now, on wings of song as it were, and try and help you forget for a while your drab, wretched lives.

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.

In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Thomas Friedman

When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.'

Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They're playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They're just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. That's what we're up against in Iraq. We're up against a suicide supply chain.

America needs rebooting.

Basically all the world's computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia.

By 'flat' I did not mean that the world is getting equal. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. That's why an Indian in Bangalore can take care of the office work of American doctors or read the X-rays of German hospitals.

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.  

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

 
We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.

We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that.