Famous Quotes & Sayings

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What is an optimist? The man who says, "It's worse everywhere else. We're better off than the rest of the world. We've been lucky." He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself. What is a pessimist? The man who says, "Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break." He torments himself continually.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.

Alec Waugh

A man desires praise that he may be reassured, that he may be quit of his doubting of himself; he is indifferent to applause when he is confident of success.

Alec Guinness

The applause of all but very good men is no more than the precise measure of their possible hostility.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

A man doesn't cry. In my life, I've never cried. I cannot do it. I am a man. How will I cry?

Aleister Crowley

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

Aleister Crowley

Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding.

Aleister Crowley

Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.

Aleister Crowley

It is only necessary to destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man's course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god.

Aleister Crowley

Alas the Master; so he sinks in death. But whoso knows the mystery of man Sees life and death as curves of the same plan

Aleister Crowley

Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.

Aleister Crowley

This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade 'Know Thyself!' and taught Initiation.

Aleister Crowley

If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

Aleister Crowley

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.

Aleister Crowley

Ever man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.

Aleister Crowley

A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.

Aleister Crowley

It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.

Aleister Crowley

The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it.

Alberto Moravia

This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.

Alberto Giacometti

When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.