New Quotations |
New entries: Quotes recently added to Best-Quotations.
War is the continuation of politics by other means. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-02-2024 | |
No military leader became great without audacity. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-02-2024 | |
One can acquire everything by solitude, except character. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-02-2024 | |
There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance. — Gottfried Leibnitz, 1646-1716, German philosopher & mathematician 01-01-2024 | |
I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 01-01-2024 | |
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. — Cyril Connolly, 1903-1974, British writer 01-01-2024 | |
No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life. — Cyril Connolly, 1903-1974, British writer 01-01-2024 | |
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do. — Cyril Connolly, 1903-1974, British writer 01-01-2024 | |
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. — Cyril Connolly, 1903-1974, British writer 01-01-2024 | |
In war, more than anywhere else, things never turn out the way we expect them to. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
There can only be one decisive victory: the last one. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
If we want to secure peace, let us prepare for war. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Everything in war is very simple, but even the simplest is very difficult. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
It is better to act quickly and be wrong than to hesitate and let the time for action pass. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Every suspension of offensive action, either from erroneous views, from fear or from indolence, is in favor of the side acting defensively. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Although our logic seeks clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty exciting. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
In war we primarily strike at the enemy’s center of gravity. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
The world has a way of undermining complex plans. This is particularly true in fast moving environments. A fast moving environment can evolve more quickly than a complex plan can be adapted to it. By the time you have adapted, the target has changed. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
Boldness becomes rarer, the higher the rank. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
A strong character is one that will not be unbalanced by the most powerful emotions. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
The side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 01-01-2024 | |
The essential quality of a historian is not to be able to invent. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
A strange thing: The Enlightenment period in Italy ended when petty bloodthirsty tyrants were replaced by moderate monarchs. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Russians imitate French ways, but always from a distance of fifty years. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Pleasure is often destroyed when we try to describe it. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
A woman in her forties has value only to the men who loved her in her youth. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the intelligence of the few. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
There is much less envy in America than in France. And much less spirit. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Luck grabs you by the hair, but she herself is bald. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
God's only excuse is that He doesn't exist. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Tears are an extreme smile. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Whatever diplomats and poets may say, the most important trait of language is clarity. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Beauty is a promise of happiness. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
One must give the conquest of a woman the attention one gives to a game of billiards. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Old age is nothing but the absence of craziness, the loss of illusion and passion. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
It's not so much being rich that brings happiness, it's becoming rich. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The only way of touching a heart is to wound it. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
I love her beauty, but I fear her mind. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
I used to think of death like I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
A good book is an event in my life. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
People happy in love have an air of intensity. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Our true passions are selfish. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
What is really beautiful must always be true. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The only unhappiness is a life of boredom. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
When you want to court a woman, court her sister first. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Women prefer feelings over logic. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
The most useful idea for tyrants is the idea of God. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 01-01-2024 | |
Style is everyone’s unique way of expressing the same thing. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 12-29-2023 | |
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless. — Cyril Connolly, 1903-1974, British writer 12-28-2023 | |
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present. — Cyril Connolly, 1903-1974, British writer 12-28-2023 | |
Prudery is a form of avarice, the worst of all. — Stendhal, 1783-1842, French writer 12-27-2023 | |
The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives, which exercise a determining influence on the commander’s will, the more the difficulties will increase. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 12-26-2023 | |
A general who allows himself to be decisively defeated in an extended mountain position deserves to be court-martialled. — Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831, Prussian military theorist 12-26-2023 | |
The Christian is a bad pagan, converted by a bad Jew. — Simone Weil, 1909-1943, French philosopher 12-25-2023 | |
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-06-2023 | |
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-06-2023 | |
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-06-2023 | |
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-06-2023 | |
God is for men, and religion for women. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-06-2023 | |
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-06-2023 | |
Philosophy is an art form — art of thought or thought as art. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
My library is an archive of longings. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Rules of taste enforce structures of power. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Art is seduction, not rape. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ‘spirit’ over matter. — Susan Sontag, 1933-2004, American writer, critic, activist 11-05-2023 | |
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
All a man can betray is his conscience. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
Never test another man by your own weakness. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 | |
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog. — Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, British-Polish writer 11-05-2023 |