August Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to August. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.
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August Wilson
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Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.
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August Strindberg (Miss Julie)
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It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.
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Robert A. Heinlein
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August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down." [Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]
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Edgar Allan Poe (The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe)
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AUGUST PULLMAN'S PRECEPT Everyone deserves a standing ovation because we all overcometh the world. --Auggie
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R.J. Palacio (Wonder (Wonder, #1))
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It was a cruel trick of the universe, thought August, that he only felt human after doing something monstrous.
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Victoria Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
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Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...
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William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)
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Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." [Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]
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Harry Truman
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.
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Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
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In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued." (From a speech read on video on August 31, 1995 before the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing, China)
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Aung San Suu Kyi
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Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.
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Auguste Escoffier
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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And in August it will be fifty-two years together.” β€œWow,” Oliver says. β€œThat’s amazing.” β€œI wouldn’t call it amazing,” the woman says, blinking. β€œIt’s easy when you find the right person.
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Jennifer E. Smith (The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight)
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Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!
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David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)
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There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.
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August Strindberg (The ghost sonata)
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I read somewhere," said Kate, "that people are made of stardust." He dragged his eyes from the sky. "Really?" "Maybe that's what you're made of. Just like us." And despite everything, August smiled.
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Victoria Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
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The older lady harrumphed. "I warned you, daughter. This scoundrel Hades is no good. You could've married the god of doctors or the god of lawyers, but noooo. You had to eat the pomegranate." "Mother-" "And get stuck in the Underworld!" "Mother, please-" "And here it is August, and do you come home like you're supposed to? Do you ever think about your poor lonely mother?" "DEMETER!" Hades shouted. "That is enough. You are a guest in my house." "Oh, a house is it?" she said. "You call this dump a house? Make my daughter live in this dark, damp-" "I told you," Hades said, grinding his teeth, "there's a war in the world above. You and Persephone are better off here with me." "Excuse me," I broke in. "But if you're going to kill me, could you just get on with it?
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Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
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Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer
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Jenny Han (The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1))
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The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.
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Natalie Babbitt (Tuck Everlasting)
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I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.
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Tove Jansson
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December is the toughest month of the year. Others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, October, August, and February.
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Mark Twain
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Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright
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Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)
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What is today’s date?” He is so random. I lift my head and look at him. β€œThe eighth of August. Why?” β€œJust want to make sure you never forget the date the universe brought us back together.
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Colleen Hoover (All Your Perfects)
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I think we're too young to be dating. I mean I don't see what the rush is." Summer says. "Yeah, I agree," said August. "Which is kind of a shame, you know what with all those babes who keep throwing themselves at me and stuff?
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R.J. Palacio (Wonder (Wonder, #1))
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It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. [Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]
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Steven Pinker
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own." [The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]
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William Hazlitt (Essays of William Hazlitt: Selected and Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Frank Carr)
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There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.
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Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. ― Don DeLillo, Americana (ACTES SUD; 0 edition, August 10, 1993)
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Don DeLillo (AmΓ©ricana)
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I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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It hurts,” he whispered. β€œWhat does?” asked Kate. β€œBeing. Not being. Giving in. Holding out. No matter what I do, it hurts.” Kate tipped her head back against the tub. β€œThat’s life, August,” she said. β€œYou wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re monster or human. Living hurts.
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Victoria Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
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Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
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Edgar Allan Poe (The Mystery of Marie RogΓͺt (C. Auguste Dupin, #2))
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My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world.
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Jack Layton
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I know it hurts," she said. "So make it worth the pain." "How?" "By not letting go," she said softly. "By holding on, to anger, to hope, or whatever it is that keeps you fighting." You, he thought.
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V.E. Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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The most it ever seems we know how to do with time, is to waste it.
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Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August)
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I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.
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August Wilson (The Piano Lesson)
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When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. {Letter to John Adams, from Monticello, 15 August 1820}
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Thomas Jefferson (Letters of Thomas Jefferson)
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Mourning was its own kind of musicβ€”the sound of so many hearts, of so many breaths, of so many standing together.
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.
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Franz Kafka
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People were messy. They were defined not only by what they'd done, but by what they would have done, under different circumstances, molded as much by their regrets as their actions, choices they stood by and those they wished they could undo. Of course, there was no going back - time only moved forward - but people could change. For worse. And for better. It wasn't easy. The world was complicated. Life was hard. And so often, living hurt. So make it worth the pain.
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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August stared at her, aghast. "Did I know that kissing you would bring your soul to surface? That - THAT - would have the same effect as pain or music? No, I must have missed that lesson." She stared at him, agape. "August, was that sarcasm?
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
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Auguste Rodin
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I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more." (Letter to John Banister, Jr., June 19, 1787)
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Thomas Jefferson (The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Vol 11, January 1787 to August 1787)
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Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.
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Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
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We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
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It is August. My life is going to change. I feel it.
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Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?)
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Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.
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Tracy Letts (August: Osage County)
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You can't have real pain without real love. You can't feel grief and loss and hurt without real love. Love is the only way you can ever be really hurt deep down.
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Katherine Applegate (Beach Blondes: June Dreams / July's Promise / August Magic (Summer, #1-3))
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I’m willing to walk in darkness if it keeps humans in the light.
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.
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Edgar Allan Poe (The Mystery of Marie RogΓͺt (C. Auguste Dupin, #2))
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The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
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Natalie Babbitt (Tuck Everlasting)
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I'd rather be able to see the truth than live a lie.
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Victoria Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
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I didn't stop fighting," he said, the words so low he worried Kate wouldn't hear them, but she did. "I just got tired of losing. It's easier this way." "Of course it's easier," said Kate. "that doesn't mean it's right.
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.
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Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August)
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The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (The Constitution of Liberty)
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You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
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August Wilson
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Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you're not helping people, just servicing the machine.
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Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August)
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August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--" Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't... August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.
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Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)
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Is today the first time you’ve been beaten in an okton?’ β€˜Technically, it was a draw,’ said Damen. β€˜Technically. I told you I was quite good at riding. I used to beat Auguste all the time when we raced at Chastillon. It took me until I was nine to realise he was letting me win. I just thought I had a very fast pony. You’re smiling.
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C.S. Pacat (Kings Rising (Captive Prince, #3))
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Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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You both passed out,” Percy said. β€œI don’t know why, but Ella told me not to worry about it. She said you were…sharing?” β€œSharing,” Ella agreed. She crouched in the stern, preening her wing feathers with her teeth, which didn’t look like a very effective form of personal hygiene. She spit out some red fluff. β€œSharing is good. No more blackouts. Biggest American blackout, August 14, 2003. Hazel shared. No more blackouts.” Percy scratched his head. β€œYeah…we’ve been having conversations like that all night. I still don’t know what she’s talking about.
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Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
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Patience is also a form of action.
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Auguste Rodin
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Do you ever wonder why music brings a soul to surface? What makes beauty work as well as pain?
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time
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Friedrich A. Hayek (Constitution of Liberty)
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Of course I love you. I could go back in time and have a whole life and get old and never see you again, and you would still be it. You wereβ€” you are the love of my life.
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Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
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The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!
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Auguste Rodin
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Brunettes are full of electricity.
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Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (Tomorrow's Eve)
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And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.
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Edgar Allan Poe (The Purloined Letter (C. Auguste Dupin, #3))
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Jane is spun sugar. A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.
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Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
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Whatever he was made of β€” stardust or ash or life or death β€” would be gone. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. In with gunfire and out with smoke. And August wasn’t ready to die. Even if surviving wasn’t simple, or easy, or fair. Even if he could never be human. He wanted the chance to matter. He wanted to live.
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Victoria Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
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Someone should tell you you're beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone should tell you you're beautiful on Wednesdays. And at teatime. Someone should tell you you're beautiful on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and the evening before Christmas Eve, and on Easter. He should tell you on Guy Fawkes Night and on New Year's, and on the eigth of August, just because.
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Dana Schwartz (Anatomy (The Anatomy Duology, #1))
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It's wonderful how, the moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven't the true faith.
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August Strindberg (The Father)
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I spent a long time playing that game,” she said. β€œPretending there were other versions of this world, where other versions of me got to live, and be happy, even if I didn’t, and you know what? It’s lonely as hell. Maybe there are other versions, other lives, but this one’s ours. It’s all we’ve got.
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Victoria Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
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I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember exactly when it died.
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Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August)
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Do I have to be here to belong to you?' Froi asked. 'Can't I belong to you wherever I am?
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Melina Marchetta (Quintana of Charyn (Lumatere Chronicles, #3))
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The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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The whole thing's illusion, [Jacob], and there's nothing wrong with that. It's what people want from us. It's what they expect.
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Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants)
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I dream, therefore I exist.
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August Strindberg
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Autumn is my spring!
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August Strindberg (A Dream Play)
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She was the captain of her soul
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity.
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Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August: An Indian Story)
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I can see that I imagine all kinds of rejection that never happens. I can see that I beg and plead for love that is freely offered because I somehow believe that if I don't ask for it, everyone will forget about me: I will be a little kid sent off to sleep-away camp whose parents forget to meet her at the bus when she comes back in August. Or else I think people are nice to me only to be nice to me, that they feel sorry for me because I am such a loser- as if anyone could possibly be that generous.
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Elizabeth Wurtzel (More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction)
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This is just shit. It's happening. No blame. Happening and on the rise it would appear. What can we do to delay it? Probably zilch. To stop it? Likely less. But to survive it? Now that sounds more promising. There is evidence of bad shit having been survived before. Ancient Advice Left in cave by Wise French Caveman: "When Bigbad Shit come, no run scream hide. Try paint picture of it on wall. Drum to it. Sing to it. Dance to it. This give you handle on it." So Twister is my try. Ken Kesey in a letter to Allen Ginsberg (August 1993)
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Ken Kesey
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Take from my palms, to soothe your heart, a little honey, a little sun, in obedience to Persephone's bees. You can't untie a boat that was never moored, nor hear a shadow in its furs, nor move through thick life without fear. For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive. Deep in the transparent night they're still humming, at home in the dark wood on the mountain, in the mint and lungwort and the past. But lay to your heart my rough gift, this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees that once made a sun out of honey. ― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems (NYRB Classics; 1st edition, August 31, 2004) Originally published 1972
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Osip Mandelstam (The Selected Poems)
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Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say while some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.
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Kent Nerburn
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He just thought quietly, 'So this is love. I see, I was wrong about it too', thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. [...] 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly. 'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
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If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor... We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications... That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law... That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. [Letter to William Short, 4 August, 1820]
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Thomas Jefferson (Letters of Thomas Jefferson)
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Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." "This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
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Frederick Douglass
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There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.
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E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)
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There was this girl. I met her on a train. The first time I saw her, she was covered in coffee and smelled like pancakes, and she was beautiful like a city you always wanted to go to, like how you wait years and years for the right time, and then as soon as you get there, you have to taste everything and touch everything and know every street by name. I felt like I knew her. She reminded me who I was. She had soft lips and green eyes and a body that wouldn’t quit. Hair like you wouldn’t believe. Stubborn, sharp as a knife. And I never, ever wanted a person to save me until she did.
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Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
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Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – TraitΓ© Γ‰lΓ©mentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. HonorΓ© de Balzac – PΓ¨re Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri PoincarΓ© – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
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Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)