Famous Quotes & Sayings

Simone Weil

In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.

Simone Weil

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

Simone Weil

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

Simone Weil

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

Simon Pegg

I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack.

Rick Riordan

Chiron probably wanted me to say, Heck it wa nothing. I eat hellhounds for breakfast. But I didn't feel like lying.

Thomas Mann

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

Thomas Mann

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Thomas Merton

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

Thomas Merton

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing.

Thomas Carlyle

Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!

Thomas Carlyle

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.

Thomas Carlyle

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

Thomas Carlyle

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

Thomas Carlyle

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

Thomas Carlyle

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

Thomas Carlyle

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

Thomas Carlyle

Lies exist only to be extinguished.

Thomas Carlyle

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

Thomas Carlyle

Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.

Thomas Carlyle

Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

Thomas Carlyle

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest to thee," which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Thomas Carlyle

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Thomas Carlyle

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Thomas Carlyle

Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.

Thomas Carlyle

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

Thomas Carlyle

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Tony Kushner

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course-arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.

Tony Kushner

If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.

Tony Kushner

Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

Tony Dorsett

You can turn the negative around and use it as a motivating force in your lie. One of my biggest desires has always been to prove certain people wrong - to prove to them I can do it despite what they think or say.