WRITERS QUOTES

QUOTES FROM FAMOUS WRITERS

Albert Einstein

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will" (1) has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place. I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

 

This is just an old paradox in discussions of free will.
You are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires. Similarly, Marx said, "man" makes his own history, but not under the historical conditions of his choosing. And Mill attempted to secularize the paradox by observing that we are slaves to habit, but can step back and form those habits. We can, in some measure, both rely on causes and effects and intervene between them.
The idea, which arises in many forms, is that "freedom" is indeed inevitably paradoxical. There is no such thing as "absolute" freedom nor "absolute" constraint. There are only indeterminacies and determinations on different levels, of which one may or may not be aware. To put it in a rather trivial manner: you can chose your actions, but not your "will", i.e. your outlook (on life) that directs these actions.
@ abbreviation of Latin id est, literally "that is;" used in English in the sense of "that is to say."

(1) A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. 

Woody Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. (vs overachiever: student)

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

OSCAR WILDE

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A timid mind is apt to mistake (misunderstand) every scratch for a mortal wound. (prone to)

Absence - that common cure of love.

Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship. 

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

I learned to love despair. (hopelessness) 

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.

I am not now That which I have been.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.  

Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it

The busy have no time for tears.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain (emotion)

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

  Mark Twain

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Anton Chekhov

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

 Michel de Montaigne

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Daniel Dafoe

All men would be tyrants if they could.

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This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
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