Chapter 9 - You are reading Chapter 9 right now!
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Chapter 9

Friedrich Nietzsche

Woman was God's second mistake. [1]

William Wordsworth

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. [2]

Samuel Beckett

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found. [3]

Jean-Paul Sartre

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. [4]

Umberto Eco

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. [5]

John Ruskin

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort. [6]

Gabriel García Márquez

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry. [7]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- 13 ↩
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man. [8]

Bill Maher

Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them. [9]

Marcel Proust

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. [10]

Christopher Hitchens

To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world? [11]

John Dewey

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. [12]

Flannery O'Connor

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it. [13]

Geoffrey Chaucer
- 162 ↩
The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people. [14]

J.M. Barrie

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. [15]

Alfred Tennyson

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. [16]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? [17]

Adolf Hitler

He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future. [18]

Leo Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. [19]

Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much. [20]

Henry James

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. [21]

Adam Smith

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. [22]

Joe Rogan

That's my only goal. Surround myself with funny people, and make sure everyone has a good time and works hard. [23]

Thomas Sowell

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. [24]

Charles Darwin

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. [25]

Richard Dawkins

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. [26]

Henry David Thoreau

Things do not change; we change. [27]

Emil Cioran

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows. [28]

Ernest Hemingway

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. [29]

Winston Churchill

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. [30]

Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. [31]

E.O. Wilson

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. [32]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. [33]

John Locke

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. [34]

Eudora Welty

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. [35]

F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. [36]

Richard Feynman

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. [37]

James Joyce

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. [38]

Albert Camus

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. [39]

William Shakespeare

The course of true love never did run smooth. [40]

Victor Hugo

To love another person is to see the face of God. [41]

George W. Bush

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. [42]

Gore Vidal

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television. [43]

John Steinbeck

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself. [44]

Virginia Woolf

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. [45]

James Madison

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad. [46]

Thomas Paine

These are the times that try men's souls. [47]

Henri Poincare

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. [48]

Jane Austen

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. [49]

William F. Buckley Jr.

I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said. [50]

Stephen Hawking

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all. [51]

Walt Whitman

Be curious, not judgmental. [52]

John Milton

Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe. [53]

Arthur Conan Doyle

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? [54]

Immanuel Kant

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law. [55]

Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. [56]

Aristotle

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. [57]

Mark Twain

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. [58]

Franz Kafka

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. [59]

Carl Sagan

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. [60]

Voltaire

Common sense is not so common. [61]

Denis Diderot

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter. [62]

Noam Chomsky

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it. [63]

Benjamin Franklin

Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes. [64]

Arthur Schopenhauer

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. [65]

Frederick the Great

He who defends everything defends nothing. [66]

Gustave Flaubert

There is no truth. There is only perception. [67]

Bertrand Russell

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. [68]

Edgar Allan Poe

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. [69]

David Hume

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. [70]

John Berger

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. [71]

James Anthony Froude

Fear is the parent of cruelty. [72]

André Malraux

To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less. [73]

André Gide

Believe those who are seeking truth, doubt those who find it. [74]

Douglas Adams

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. [75]

George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact. [76]

Toni Morrison

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. [77]

George Orwell

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. [78]

William Faulkner

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. [79]

Elizabeth I of England

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too. [80]

Jack Kerouac

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars. [81]

Baruch Spinoza

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. [82]

John Stuart Mill

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. [83]

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. [84]

Isaac Newton

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy. [85]

Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. [86]

José Saramago

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being? [87]

William James

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. [88]

Dante Alighieri

Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge. [89]

George Bernard Shaw

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?' [90]

In Order of Appearance

Each chapter features the same authors in the same order! Different quotes.


  1. Friedrich Nietzsche - 12 ↩︎

  2. William Wordsworth - 63 ↩︎

  3. Samuel Beckett - 28 ↩︎

  4. Jean-Paul Sartre - 202 ↩︎

  5. Umberto Eco - 390 ↩︎

  6. John Ruskin - 212 ↩︎

  7. Gabriel García Márquez - 24 ↩︎

  8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 13 ↩︎

  9. Bill Maher - 11 ↩︎

  10. Marcel Proust - 54 ↩︎

  11. Christopher Hitchens - 1 ↩︎

  12. John Dewey - 47 ↩︎

  13. Flannery O'Connor - 154 ↩︎

  14. Geoffrey Chaucer - 162 ↩︎

  15. J.M. Barrie - 186 ↩︎

  16. Alfred Tennyson - 73 ↩︎

  17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 205 ↩︎

  18. Adolf Hitler - 65 ↩︎

  19. Leo Tolstoy - 25 ↩︎

  20. Oscar Wilde - 56 ↩︎

  21. Henry James - 181 ↩︎

  22. Adam Smith - 19 ↩︎

  23. Joe Rogan - 46 ↩︎

  24. Thomas Sowell - 383 ↩︎

  25. Charles Darwin - 114 ↩︎

  26. Richard Dawkins - 2 ↩︎

  27. Henry David Thoreau - 180 ↩︎

  28. Emil Cioran - 146 ↩︎

  29. Ernest Hemingway - 22 ↩︎

  30. Winston Churchill - 400 ↩︎

  31. Albert Einstein - 69 ↩︎

  32. E.O. Wilson - 142 ↩︎

  33. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 15 ↩︎

  34. John Locke - 49 ↩︎

  35. Eudora Welty - 150 ↩︎

  36. F. Scott Fitzgerald - 152 ↩︎

  37. Richard Feynman - 58 ↩︎

  38. James Joyce - 14 ↩︎

  39. Albert Camus - 9 ↩︎

  40. William Shakespeare - 8 ↩︎

  41. Victor Hugo - 60 ↩︎

  42. George W. Bush - 167 ↩︎

  43. Gore Vidal - 170 ↩︎

  44. John Steinbeck - 215 ↩︎

  45. Virginia Woolf - 393 ↩︎

  46. James Madison - 193 ↩︎

  47. Thomas Paine - 382 ↩︎

  48. Henri Poincare - 179 ↩︎

  49. Jane Austen - 44 ↩︎

  50. William F. Buckley Jr. - 397 ↩︎

  51. Stephen Hawking - 59 ↩︎

  52. Walt Whitman - 394 ↩︎

  53. John Milton - 50 ↩︎

  54. Arthur Conan Doyle - 88 ↩︎

  55. Immanuel Kant - 42 ↩︎

  56. Jonathan Swift - 52 ↩︎

  57. Aristotle - 31 ↩︎

  58. Mark Twain - 26 ↩︎

  59. Franz Kafka - 23 ↩︎

  60. Carl Sagan - 20 ↩︎

  61. Voltaire - 61 ↩︎

  62. Denis Diderot - 36 ↩︎

  63. Noam Chomsky - 4 ↩︎

  64. Benjamin Franklin - 99 ↩︎

  65. Arthur Schopenhauer - 91 ↩︎

  66. Frederick the Great - 158 ↩︎

  67. Gustave Flaubert - 175 ↩︎

  68. Bertrand Russell - 10 ↩︎

  69. Edgar Allan Poe - 21 ↩︎

  70. David Hume - 35 ↩︎

  71. John Berger - 206 ↩︎

  72. James Anthony Froude - 190 ↩︎

  73. André Malraux - 76 ↩︎

  74. André Gide - 75 ↩︎

  75. Douglas Adams - 37 ↩︎

  76. George Eliot - 164 ↩︎

  77. Toni Morrison - 387 ↩︎

  78. George Orwell - 40 ↩︎

  79. William Faulkner - 62 ↩︎

  80. Elizabeth I of England - 145 ↩︎

  81. Jack Kerouac - 187 ↩︎

  82. Baruch Spinoza - 98 ↩︎

  83. John Stuart Mill - 51 ↩︎

  84. Ludwig Wittgenstein - 53 ↩︎

  85. Isaac Newton - 43 ↩︎

  86. Charles Dickens - 6 ↩︎

  87. José Saramago - 219 ↩︎

  88. William James - 398 ↩︎

  89. Dante Alighieri - 127 ↩︎

  90. George Bernard Shaw - 163 ↩︎