Category: Thought

Chance, another word for destiny.

Philip José Farmer, The Dark Design (1977).

Le doute n’est pas un état bien agréable,
mais l’assurance est un état ridicule.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia (November 28, 1770). English: in S.G. Tallentyre (ed.), Voltaire in His Letters (1919), p. 232.

I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Ken Kesey, as quoted in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kook-Aid Acid Test (1968), Chapter One.

Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.

Widely cited on the Internet as by Niccolò Machiavelli and from The Prince (16th Century), this very “Machiavellian” instruction is nowhere to be found in The Prince, but its very citation may qualify as Machiavellian.

Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that’s the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t anybody laughing. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Chapter Five.

L’homme doit être content, dit-on; mais de quoi?

Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Pensées, Remarques, et Observations de Voltaire; ouvrage posthume (1802), p. 232.

You can make the Ring an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that awaits all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work.

J. R. R. Tolkien, speaking on the central figure of the One Ring in his books The Lord of the Rings, in a letter to his publisher (July 31, 1947); published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien(1981), Letter 109.

Il est bien malaisé (puisqu’il faut enfin m’expliquer)
d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Voltaire — François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778) — Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Troisième Entretien.

Cowards are nice, they’re interesting, they’re gentle, they wouldn’t think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They’re very brave.

William Saroyan, Madness in the Family (1988).

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston, There Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.