Walter Schutjens > Walter's Quotes

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’
‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.
‘Quite so…”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Treason doth never prosper: what ’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
― John Harington

“No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“To read too many books is harmful.”
― Mao Zedong

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
― Friedrich Engels Karl Marx

“The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in Life of Ivan Denisovich

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Sometime I think; and sometime I am.”
― Paul Valéry

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use.”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“There's nothing wrong with giving up all your principles for a suitable financial reward. It is indeed the basis of our society.”
― Manny Rayner

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.”
― Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
― Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals/On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot