Otto Quotes

Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

The best men tell you the truth because they think you can take it; the worst men either try to preserve you in some innocent state with their false protection, or are ‘brutally honest.’ When someone tells, lets you think for yourself, experience your own emotions, he is treating you as a true equal, a friend…And the best men cook for you.

Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.

Don't worry, Otto. I'm an acquired taste. Most of my best friends had to know me for years before they could even stand my presence. I'm like mold, I usually grow on you very slowly. (Tabitha)

God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.

Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.

No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it’s own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that’s why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot—being only human—put asunder what God has joined together.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself," Otto replied. "Oh, and a megalomaniacal headmaster, the world's deadliets assassin, giant mutated plant monsters, an international cartel of supervillains, and the security forces of every country on earth, but other than that...just fear.

Life at H.I.V.E. may have its attractions after all, Otto thought. Friends, as they say, may come and go, but high-powered laser weapons are forever.

One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).

People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.

Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.

The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. "And my conclusion is," he said, "since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that most parents don't know really their children.

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

…she eventually forgave him, because she understood him.

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.

Anyone ever tell you you should be a lawyer? (Otto) Only Bill when we argue. Besides, I like killing bloodsuckers too much to ever be one of them. Tabitha Deveraux. Pleased to meet you. (Tabitha)

If you feel like you don't fit into the world you inherited it is because you were born to help create a new one.

Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

Yes, and for the record, he thinks you’re insane, too. (Otto) Oh, goodie. But I guess that’s only fair since I think he’s psychotic. (Susan)

she is admired from afar. These admirers court her in secret, in the safety of their dreams.

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.

one transcendent kiss that later makes lovers take soft breaths, holding hands

man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer

No one knows how another person feels in private.

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood

Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others experience.

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!" -after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872

Once you love, you cannot take it back, cannot undo it; what you felt may have changed, shifted slightly, yet still remains love. You still feel-though very small-the not-altogether unpleasant shock of soul recognition for that person.

Hounds follow those who feed them.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

[Otto von Bismarck] only considered the interests of his own country - always the worst offense that a statesman can commit in the eyes of foreigners.

Did you feed the fish?” Nick closed his eyes. “Alexa, I’m working.” She made a rude snort. “So am I. But at least I worry about poor Otto. Did you feed him?” “Otto?” “You kept calling him Fish. That hurt his feelings.” “Fish don’t have feelings. And yes, I fed him.” “Fish certainly do have feelings. And while we’re discussing Otto, I wanted to tell you I’m worried about him. He’s placed in the study and no one ever goes in there. Why don’t we move him into the living room where he can see us more often?

Veil, you see, if I vas to say something portentous like "zer dark eyes of zer mind" back home in Uberwald, zer would be a sudden crash of thunder,' said Otto. 'And if I vas to point at a castle on a towering crag and say "Yonder is . . . zer castle" a volf would be bound to howl mournfully.' He sighed. 'In zer old country, zer scenery is psychotropic and knows vot is expected of it. Here, alas, people just look at you in a funny vay.

But I don't shut up and I don't die. I live and fight, maddening those who rule my country. For if I live I fight, and if I fight I contribute to the dawn.

the main thing is to make history not to write it

In the psychical sphere there are no facts, but only interpretations of them.

Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on who he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people.

To completely understand me you must first accept that I am not you.

Every child has to raise itself.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.

Odd choice of a word, isn’t it? Fish is either singular, or plural. Imagine my surprise when I walked in the study and found not one fish in a tiny fish bowl, but an entire aquarium.” She practically vibrated for the need to fight. “Otto was lonely and you were practicing animal cruelty. He was too isolated. Now, he has friends and a place to swim.” “Yes, nice little tunnels and rocks and algae to play hide and seek with his buddies.

All you have to go on is the faith of a kiss.

I live for a woman who scratches, just make sure to keep it on the back, baby, I dont like scars." ~Otto Carvalletti

The worst dream of the night, when you are parted from someone you love and you do not know exactly where he is, but you know that he is in the presence of danger. You are tormented by a desire to keep the one you love safe.

You have to choose your combinations careful. The right choices will enhance your quilt. The wrong choices will dull the colors and hide their original beauty. There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave.

Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.

While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.

The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.

What? Had a dry spell of killing people lately? (Susan) As a matter of fact, yes. If it doesn’t end soon, I might get out of practice. (Otto)

I have an affection for those transitional seasons, the way they take the edge off the intense cold of winter, or heat of summer.

Now I have a question," Otto wrote. "Fire away." "What do you see in him?" "Apart from the obvious?" "What’s the obvious? I’m afraid I’m not a teenage girl.

I hope you don't snore," Otto said, laughing. "Like a chainsaw, my friend, like a chainsaw," Wing replied, grinning.

Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death.

We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

الحياة أشبه بالتواجد عند طبيب الأسنان. فأنت تعتقد دائما أن الأسوأ هو الذي لا يزال في طريقه إليك، رغم أنه يكون قد انتهى بالفعل.

Do we get a bedtime story?" Otto asked cheekily. "Oh yes, of course. I think we'll have one of my favorites; it's called 'The Little Boy and the Tranquilizer Gun." Raven smiled in a rather unsettling way.

The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.

We're all scared most of the time. Life would be lifeless if we weren't. Be scared, and then jump into that fear. Again and again. Just remember to hold on to yourself while you do it.

Thirteen years, one night. Nine months. One small baby will deliver true love. I can't wait to see you.

Da mio padre avevo imparato, molto tempo dopo avere smesso di seguirlo sui sentieri, che in certe vite esistono montagne a cui non è possibile tornare. Che nelle vite come la mia e la sua non si può tornare alla montagna che sta al centro di tutte le altre, e all'inizio della propria storia. E che non resta che vagare per le otto montagne per chi, come noi, sulla prima e più alta ha perso un amico.

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

Think about what binds you to your husband and he to you. Marvel at the strength of that bond, which is both abstract and concrete, spiritual and legal.

My dream is to create something so beautiful that it encourages people to present the best version of themselves to me everywhere I go.

Politics ruins the character

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them

That is the true challenge--to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.

Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.

Every decision you make in life will stem from one of two options: love or fear. Choose love.

It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.

You told me, once, to just remember to breathe. As long as you can do that, you're doing something good.

I really hate Squires. (Syra) (She pulled another flat bolt out and loaded it, then shot it at Otto. Moving so fast he could hardly be seen, the Squire turned around and caught it without flinching. He held the bolt up to his nose and inhaled it lovingly.) Mmm. Rose. My favorite. (Otto) Perhaps we should leave you two alone. (Jess) Yeah, this does remind me a bit of the mating rites of the mean and the surly. (Allen)

Not by speeches and votes of the majority, are the great questions of the time decided — that was the error of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood.

There's an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous. ("New York Blues")

You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!

We’ve come to kill Zarek of Moesia, and if you get in our way, little girl, we’re going to kill you. (Otto) I’ll be damned. He speaks. Or rather growls. (Jess) But not for long if he doesn’t watch his mouth. For the record, Squire, it would take more man than you to even scratch me. (Syra) I live for a woman who scratches. Just make sure you keep it on the back, baby. I don’t like scars. (Otto)

It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day—the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be "sanity.

Are you staying with us? It could be dangerous,' said William, realizing that he was saying this to a vampire iconographer who undied every time he took a picture.

Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg, the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual.

Eternity will not cause our memories to fade, it will force our hearts to accept the past.

If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.

The danger of insanity is always present in those who try to penetrate the discipline of logic and pure knowledge.

Only from within himself can a person know the depth of the world: in him lie the interconnections of the world.

Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?” Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation. “I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.” “True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.” Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine, after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I said. “The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he said. “And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.” “They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand.

Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.

E diceva: siete voi di città che la chiamate natura. È così astratta nella vostra testa che è astratto pure il nome. Noi qui diciamo bosco, pascolo, torrente, roccia, cose che uno può indicare con il dito. Cose che si possono usare. Se non si possono usare, un nome non glielo diamo perché non serve a niente.

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man.

I have a burden on my soul. During my long life, I did not make anyone happy, neither my friends, nor my family, nor even myself. I have done many evil things...I was the cause of the beginning of three big wars. About 800,000 people were killed because of me on the battlefields., and their mothers, brothers, and widows cried for them. And now this stands between me and God.

He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths lives cheek by jowl with life. The primal mystery is itself mad - the matrix of the duality and the unity of disunity.

Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and therefore, not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition was the craving to stifle his better self.

There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals; between chemical combinations and simple mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and birds [...]. The improbability may henceforth be taken for granted of finding in Nature a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is feminine on the other; or that any living being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly on one side, or wholly on the other, of the line.

Forse è vero, come sosteneva mia madre, che ognuno di noi ha una quota prediletta in montagna, un paesaggio che gli somiglia e dove si sente bene. La sua era senz'altro il bosco dei 1500 metri, quello di abeti e larici, alla cui ombra crescono il mirtillo, il ginepro e il rododendro, e si nascondono i caprioli. Io ero più attratto dalla montagna che viene dopo: prateria alpina, torrenti, torbiere, erbe d'alta quota, bestie al pascolo. Ancora più in alto la vegetazione scompare, la neve copre ogni cosa fino all'inizio dell'estate e il colore prevalente è il grigio della roccia, venato dal quarzo e intarsiato dal giallo dei licheni. Lì cominciava il mondo di mio padre. Dopo tre ore di cammino i prati e i boschi lasciavano il posto alle pietraie, ai laghetti nascosti nelle conche glaciali, ai canaloni solcati dalle slavine, alle sorgenti di acqua gelida. La montagna si trasformava in un luogo più aspro, inospitale e puro: lassù lui diventava felice. Ringiovaniva, forse, tornando ad altre montagne e altri tempi. Anche il suo passo sembrava perdere peso e ritrovare un'agilità perduta.