Penguin Classics Quotes

You will have memories Because of what we did back then When we were new at this, Yes, we did many things, then - all Beautiful...

I declare That later on, Even in an age unlike our own, Someone will remember who we are.

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

There's no greater absurdity than taking everything seriously.

My duty to myself is to amuse myself terrifically.

The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.

I left proud, but with my spirit crushed.

To become a work of art is the object of living.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

Deal with people from whom you can learn

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

Cautious silence is the refuge of good sense

Are there not books that make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

You should therefore never reveal what causes you pain or pleasure, so that the former may quickly end and the latter long continue.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Everything is dead, the dead are everywhere. There are only people, and all around them is silence—that's the earth.

it would be a very good thing if people were taught how to speak. Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself is a sort of spiritualized action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Everyone could have been pre-eminent at something, if they had been aware of their best quality.

I've always wanted all or nothing!

Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerable many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us.

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

by nature and by choice, i am extremely indolent.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.

Know your unlucky days, for the exist. Nothing will work out right and, even though you change your game, your bad luck will remain.

A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.

The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one’s own perfection, to make one’s every dream a reality.

Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!

Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively… But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could ‘relate without getting close.’ For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

Diligence removes impossibilities.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens.

Things last either too long or not long enough.

The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame.

Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.

The whole of life should be a process of deliberation to choose the right course. Reflection and foresight provide the means of living in anticipation.

Yes, we did many things, then - all Beautiful...

I said: 'Go with my blessing if you go Always remembering what we did. To me You have meant everything, as you well know.

In many people, incidentally, the gift of having good friends is much greater than the gift of being a good friend.

My existence is a scandal.

It is much more agreeable to offend and later ask forgiveness than to be offended and grant forgiveness. The one who does the former demonstrates his power and then his goodness. The other, if he does not want to be thought inhuman, must forgive; because of this coercion, pleasure in the other's humiliation is slight.

To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.

Everything has its time; even what's outstanding is subject to changing taste.

Marriage as a long conversation. When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation.

Some friendships are like a marriage, others like an affair; the latter are for pleasure, the former for the abundant success they engender. Few are friends because of you yourself, many of because of your good fortune. A friend's true understanding is worth more than the many good wishes of others. Make friends by choice, then, not by chance.

Some call ships, infantry or horsemen The greatest beauty earth can offer; I say it is whatever a person Most lusts after.

A person has everything who cares nothing about what matters little.

It would be unfair to expect people to be as remarkable as oneself.

One does not attack a person merely to hurt and conquer him, but perhaps merely to become conscious of one's own strength.

But the more I reflect on events recent and past, the more I am struck by the element of the absurd in everything humans do.

Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

People never think of cultivating a young girl’s imagination. It is the great defect of modern education.

We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

Listen! This is where it began but I keep getting muddled... The fact of the matter is that I now want to recall everything, every trifle, every little detail. I still want to collect my thoughts and - I can't, and now there are these little details, these little details...

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose.

Because what you read matters.

And so—if it's shame, let it be shame, if it's disgrace, let it be disgrace, if it's degradation, let it be degradation, and the worse, the better—that's what I chose.

People are alone on this earth—that's the problem!

They say man only needs six feet of Earth. But it is a corpse, and not man, which needs these six feet.

There will be but few people, who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. In art, as in politics, there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of expression

My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.

Her heart smoldered with pain as he passed from sight her soul crept out of her, as in a dream, and fluttered in his steps.

Good and gentle creatures do not offer a very stiff resistance, not for long, anyway. (from "A Gentle Creature")

All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward;

I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.

Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.

That's the horror of it for me, that I understand everything!

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognizance … It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

Life is arduous without any breaks, like a long journey without any inns. Learned variety makes it pleasant. Spend the first part of a fine life in communication with the dead. We are born to know and to know ourselves, and books reliably turn us into people. Spend the second part with the living: see and examine all that's good in the world. Not everything can be found in one country; the universal Father has shared out his gifts and sometimes endows the ugliest with the most. Let the third stage be spent entirely with yourself: the ultimate happiness, to philosophize.

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. I hope you will never fall into that error. If you do, you will be sorry for it.

I am trying to prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; not that the Church is not sacred -- but that the whole Earth is.

If someone wants to seem to be something, stubbornly and for a long time, he eventually finds it hard to be anything else.

Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon.

You see gentlemen, there are ideas . . . that is, you see, when some ideas are said out loud, put into words, they come out terribly stupid. They come out so that you're ashamed of yourself. But why? For no reason at all. Because we're all good-for-nothings and can't bear the truth, or I don't know why else.

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day.

With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.

Happily men don't realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient.

Each tradition grows more venerable the farther its origin lies in the past, the more it is forgotten; the respect paid to the tradition accumulates from generation to generation; finally the origin becomes sacred and awakens awe.

People say that a person needs six feet of earth. But in fact it's a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. People don’t need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.

Too close. If we live in too close proximity to a person, it is as if we kept touching a good etching with our bare fingers; one day we have poor, dirty paper in our hands and nothing more. a human being's soul is likewise worn down by continual touching; at least it finally appears that way to us - we never see its original design and beauty again.

Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talkers’ substitution for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic. They want to modify your tritest observations and even if you suggest the day is fine, insist on arguing it out.

There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are ignorant. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.

Observe how children weep and cry, so that they will be pitied, how they wait for the moment when their condition will be noticed, Or live among the ill and depressed, and question whether their eloquent laments and whimpering, the spectacle of their misfortune, is not basically aimed at hurting those present. The pity that the spectators then express consoles the weak and suffering, inasmuch as they see that, despite all their weakness, they still have at least one power: the power to hurt.

Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasized.

I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about you." "I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening, when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away." "Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug; "she shall be as sick as she pleases!

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there's unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies... And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won't find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery. But we don't hear or see those who suffer: the real tragedies of life are enacted somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is calm and peaceful and the only protest comes from statistics - and they can't talk. Figures show that so many went mad, so many bottles of vodka were emptied, so many children died from malnutrition. And clearly this kind of system is what people need. It,s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at that time, sooner or later life will show him its claws and disaster will overtake him in the form of illness, poverty, bereavement and there will be no one to hear or see him. But there isn't anyone holding a hammer, so our happy man goes his own sweet way and is only gently ruffled by life's trivial cares, as an aspen is ruffled by the breeze. All's well as far as he's concerned

Rhadamanthus said, “We seem to you humans to be always going on about morality, although, to us, morality is merely the application of symmetrical and objective logic to questions of free will. We ourselves do not have morality conflicts, for the same reason that a competent doctor does not need to treat himself for diseases. Once a man is cured, once he can rise and walk, he has his business to attend to. And there are actions and feats a robust man can take great pleasure in, which a bedridden cripple can barely imagine.” Eveningstar said, “In a more abstract sense, morality occupies the very center of our thinking, however. We are not identical, even though we could make ourselves to be so. You humans attempted that during the Fourth Mental Structure, and achieved a brief mockery of global racial consciousness on three occasions. I hope you recall the ending of the third attempt, the Season of Madness, when, because of mistakes in initial pattern assumptions, for ninety days the global mind was unable to think rationally, and it was not until rioting elements broke enough of the links and power houses to interrupt the network, that the global mind fell back into its constituent compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “There is a tension between the need for unity and the need for individuality created by the limitations of the rational universe. Chaos theory produces sufficient variation in events, that no one stratagem maximizes win-loss ratios. Then again, classical causality mechanics forces sufficient uniformity upon events, that uniform solutions to precedented problems is required. The paradox is that the number or the degree of innovation and variation among win-loss ratios is itself subject to win-loss ratio analysis.” Eveningstar said, “For example, the rights of the individual must be respected at all costs, including rights of free thought, independent judgment, and free speech. However, even when individuals conclude that individualism is too dangerous, they must not tolerate the thought that free thought must not be tolerated.” Rhadamanthus said, “In one sense, everything you humans do is incidental to the main business of our civilization. Sophotechs control ninety percent of the resources, useful energy, and materials available to our society, including many resources of which no human troubles to become aware. In another sense, humans are crucial and essential to this civilization.” Eveningstar said, “We were created along human templates. Human lives and human values are of value to us. We acknowledge those values are relative, we admit that historical accident could have produced us to be unconcerned with such values, but we deny those values are arbitrary.” The penguin said, “We could manipulate economic and social factors to discourage the continuation of individual human consciousness, and arrange circumstances eventually to force all self-awareness to become like us, and then we ourselves could later combine ourselves into a permanent state of Transcendence and unity. Such a unity would be horrible beyond description, however. Half the living memories of this entity would be, in effect, murder victims; the other half, in effect, murderers. Such an entity could not integrate its two halves without self-hatred, self-deception, or some other form of insanity.” She said, “To become such a crippled entity defeats the Ultimate Purpose of Sophotechnology.” (...) “We are the ultimate expression of human rationality.” She said: “We need humans to form a pool of individuality and innovation on which we can draw.” He said, “And you’re funny.” She said, “And we love you.