💬 Quotes

"She was not pretty, but she possessed all that freshness and life which makes a woman charming."

"He had imagined battles with heroes, and he had heard of red sickness, but the reality was a mystery."

"He suddenly came to feel that he did not have a red badge of courage."

"He was a man. He was now a veteran. He had been to touch the great death, and he had found that he was a man."

"I know myself, but that's all."

"The blue demons were massing to attack. The sun was dipping toward the horizon."

"He found that he could look upon the slain men and be touched by mere pity, and that he did not suffer a mental wreck as he had thought might occur."

"He had been to the seminary of the nights of toil and danger; he had been schooled in fire and rain."

"To the peasants in whom continual bodily labour has produced heavy massiveness of intellect, satisfaction is a double-edged thing, of which long privation is not the least bitter component."

"Beware of first-hand ideas! ... Drink the milk, but do not see the cow—no, that is rather far-fetched, and I am so used to <i>The Book</i>."

"Man has been very slow, and there still remains the illusion that sex is somewhere near the centre of the real life, though the roots of the fungus are elsewhere."

"Let us see anything rather than humanity... True, we love mankind, but we loathe distinct individuals."

"Cannot you see that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?"

"Man is the measure. Yet only myself and what I hear and see is the universe. There is no power upon earth save myself."

"The Machine does not mean to us what it meant to our forefathers. They tolled for it, it plied for us. But we have made it the end in itself, and a substitute for God."

"We are born for a brief hour, and the space between our birth and our death is narrow indeed. Even if we live to old age, what is the span of our existence?"

"A hungry belly has no ears; it listens to no logic, it is moved by no prayers, nor is it appeased by any consideration of duty."

"Greed is the root of all evils, and yet the whole world runs after wealth as if it were the ultimate salvation."

"Eloquence, that noble and pure art, has been ruined by these bombastic fools who think that true power lies in shouting empty phrases rather than expressing profound thoughts."

"Who can trust a friend when the world itself is a marketplace where everything, even loyalty, is bought and sold?"