Born on June 19 — Quotes

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

Rahul: Look. All I'm saying, all I'm saying is that there is a difference between the 1984 riots and the Gujarat riots. The simple difference is that in 1984 the government was not involved in the massacre of people. In Gujarat it was. The question is why do these kind of things take place. Why is it that the Gujarat riots took place? The Gujarat riots took place frankly because of the way our system is structured, because of the fact that people do not have a voice in the system. And what I want to do. And I have said it and I will say it again. What I want to do is question the fundamentals over here. What I want to do is ask a couple of questions. I want to ask why candidates that are chosen in every single party are chosen by a tiny number of people. I want to ask why women have to be scared to go out on the street. I want to ask these questions. These are fundamental questions.

The sole case of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room

It is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on, because the reality may be that you don't know what is going on, but people won't be able to tell the difference.

We run carelessly over the precipice after having put something in front of us to prevent us seeing it.

I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

If all you've got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you'll betray yourself.

Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point.

Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer.
Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.

Each day I deceived myself, unlike you who could never deceive yourself. Anxiety was trapped in the depths of my heart, like a formation of black clouds I could not break free of.

A child's cry touches a father's heart, and our King is the Father of his people. If we can do no more than cry it will bring omnipotence to our aid. A cry is the native language of a spiritually needy soul; it has done with fine phrases and long orations, and it takes to sobs and moans; and so, indeed, it grasps the most potent of all weapons, for heaven always yields to such artillery.

Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is "impartial" about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)