Neal Parikh

It feels good to act like a cad.

Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.

A well-made cocktail may be a perilous pleasure, but it isn't the only one. More than a few people have been undone by love, but we don't abjure it. Rather, one of the central storylines in the history of civilization has been the effort to make love livable.

A good drink, though not without risk, can be eminently livable. Alcohol is no doubt a drug, but in moderation it is a very social one. It primes the conversational pump; it nudges the shy from the bonds of their awkwardness; it midwives romance; it concludes treaties. Firewater, like fire, can be awesomely destructive; learning to marshal the power of both is a hallmark of civilization.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Not all those who wander are lost.

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

A storm broke loose in my mind.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

Facts are stupid things — until brought into connection with some general law.

Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of race, class, gender and regional or national identity, his characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape.

People who read Cosmopolitan magazine are very different from those who do not.

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

To be original you must listen to the voice of your heart rather than the clamor of the world — and have the courage to teach publicly what you have learned. The source of all genius is sincerity; men would be wiser if they were more moral.

One of the things I like about doing science, the thing that is the most fun, is coming up with something that seems ridiculous when you first hear it but finally seems obvious when you're finished.

I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up, I want to be a little boy.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

I was worth about a million dollars when I was twenty-three, and about ten million when I was twenty-four, and about a hundred million when I was twenty-five, but it didn't matter because I never did it for the money.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Once I didn't know what charisma meant; I met Steve Jobs and then I knew.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Only the educated are free.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth,
Loses the past and is dead for the future.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.

One cannot befriend a man without obsessions, for he lacks deep emotion.

Never trust a computer you can't throw out the window.

Design isn't just how it looks. It's how it works.

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Computing science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I don't know the secret of success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.

For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong.

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, or seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you'll get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

The secret of all those who make discoveries is that they regard nothing as impossible.

Nothing determines who we will become so much as those things we choose to ignore.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue...Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.

Literature was born the day a boy cried wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.

Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you can get between the right man and the right woman.

I asked the girl if she could bring a sister for me. She did. Sister Maria Teresa. It was a very slow evening. We discussed the New Testament. We agreed that He was very well adjusted for an only child.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better ... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

We should forget about small efficiences, say, about 97% of the time. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern development, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

The two biggest myths about me are that I'm an intellectual, because I wear these glasses, and that I'm an artist because my films lose money. Those two myths have been prevalent for many years.

For some reason I'm more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily as lying down.

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

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Apple employees want someone they can respect, who understands how Apple operates but who will, at the same time, put the fear of God into them in order to drive them on. And Steve Jobs is that man.

I used to be with it, but then what it was changed, and now what I'm with isn't it anymore.

One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo - the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

Childhood is short and maturity is forever.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

A mathematician is a system for turning coffee into theorems.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whenever you say something to them, they translate it into their own language, and at once it is something entirely different.

Q: I heard if you play the Windows NT CD backwards, you get a satanic message.
A: That's nothing. If you play it forward, it installs NT.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.

The world would be a better place if Larry Wall had been born in Iceland, or any other country where the native language actually has syntax.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of another boy.

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself.

Only do what only you can do.

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.

In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.

If, ten years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this," that would be enough immortality for me.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

Omit needless words.

Most people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.

Some problems are better evaded than solved.

Machines do not think and therefore can be much more reliable than humans.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

No, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Computers work. People think.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Never express yourself more clearly than you can think.

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.

I wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member.

Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a facist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that it is not worth the trouble. Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous nature of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste first brought death into this world, and all our woe...

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

Every why hath a wherefore.

For a light heart lives long.

Having nothing, nothing he can lose.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

He jests at scars who never felt a wound.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Patch griefs with proverbs.

Jesters may oft prove prophets.

The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

You may my glories and my state dispose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

My third maxim was to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to alter my desires rather than change the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believe that there is nothing entirely within our power but our own thoughts: so that after we have done our best in regard to things that are without us, our ill-success cannot possibly be failure on our part. And this alone seemed to me sufficient to prevent my desiring anything in the future beyond what I could actually obtain, hence rendering me content; for since our will does not naturally induce us to desire anything but what our understanding represents to it as in some way possible of attainment, it is certain that if we consider all good things which are outside of us as equally outside of our power, we should not have more regret in resigning those goods which appear to pertain to our birth, when we are deprived of them for no fault of our own, than we have in not possessing the kingdoms of China or Mexico. In the same way, making what is called a virtue out of a necessity, we should no more desire to be well if ill, or free, if in prison, than we now do to have our bodies formed of a substance as little corruptible as diamonds, or to have wings to fly with like birds. I allow, however, that to accustom oneself to regard all things from this point of view requires long exercise and meditation often repeated; and I believe that it is principally in this that is to be found the secret of those philosophers who, in ancient times, were able to free themselves from the empire of fortune, or, despite suffering or poverty, to rival their gods in their happiness. For, ceaselessly occupying themselves in considering the limits which were prescribed to them by nature, they persuaded themselves so completely that nothing was within their own power but their thoughts, that this conviction alone was sufficient to prevent their having any longing for other things. And they had so absolute a mastery over their thoughts that they had some reason for esteeming themselves as more rich and more powerful, and more free and more happy than other men, who however favored by nature of fortune they might be, if devoid of this philosophy, never could arrive at all at which they aim.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, for you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

These are the noises. But there is something here that is more dreadful: the silence. I imagine that during great fires such a moment of extreme tension must sometimes occur: the jets of water fall back, the firemen stop climbing the ladders, no one moves. Soundlessly a black cornice pushes forward overhead, and a high wall, with flames shooting up behind it, leans forward, soundlessly. Everyone stands and waits, with raised shoulders and faces contracted above their eyes, for the terrifying crash. The silence here is like that.

I think I should begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight years old, and I have done practically nothing. To sum it up: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad; a play entitled "Marriage," which tries to demonstrate a false thesis by equivocal means; and some poems. Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents who you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else —); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, — and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like all dilettantes, and are looked upon as masteres. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which ahs always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing?

Fate loves to invent designs and patterns. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has just a few elements, of a grandeur we can never fathom.

Such love doesn't need any response; it contains both call-note and answer in itself; it is its own fulfillment.

Outside, much has changed. I don't know how. But inside and before you, Lord, inside before you, Spectator: aren't we without action? We discover, indeed, that we don't know our part; we look for a mirror; we want to rub off the make-up and remove everything that is artificial, and become real. But somewhere a piece of our disguise still sticks to us, which we forgot. A trace of exaggeration remains on our eyebrows; we don't notice that the corners of our mouth are twisted. And this is how we go around, a laughing-stock and a half-truth: neither real beings nor actors.

To be loved means to be consumed in flames. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.

What does one do with the millions of facts bearing witness to the one fact that people knowingly, that is, possessing full knowledge of their own true interests, have relegated them to the background and have rushed down a different path, that of risk and chance, compelled by no one and nothing, but merely as if they didn't want to follow the beaten track, and so they stubbornly, willfully forged another way, a difficult and absurd one, searching for it almost in the darkness?

...the whole world is a work of art; ...we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

...at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit hanging, trembling.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

...but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, "Oh, how beautiful!" For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, beautiful, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The wrath of a god is hard to deal with.

I love her not with my mind or my imagination, but with my whole being. Loving her I feel myself to be an integral part of all God's joyous world.

Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle,
would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal,
so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost
nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory.
But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us
in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,
let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.

They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.

Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony . The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

My own experience is that the more we study art, the less we care for nature. What art really reveals to us is nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but as Aristotle said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach nature her proper place.

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe that the future of Art lies in this direction. I see it, as it has developed from its beginnings, growing progressively more ethereal, from the Egyptian pylons to Gothic lancets, from the 20,000-line Hindu poems to the effusions of Byron. Form, as it is mastered, becomes attenuated; it becomes dissociated from any liturgy, rule, yardstick; the epic is discarded in favor of the novel, verse in favor of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. This emancipation from matter can be observed everywhere: governments have gone through similar evolution, from the oriental despotisms to the socialisms of the future.

It is for this reason that there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject, style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

"Talc: You have been found guilty of misleading and perverting the young. I decree that you be hung by your underdeveloped testicles until dead. - ZORRO"

Suddenly from out on the sidewalk came a noise of heavy wooden shoes and the scraping of a stick, and a voice rose up, a raucous voice singing:

A clear day's warmth will often move
A lass to stray in dreams of love

Emma sat up like a galvanized corpse, her hair streaming, her eyes fixed and gaping.

To gather up the stalks of wheat
The swinging scythe keeps laying by,
Nanette goes stooping in the heat
Along the furrow where they lie.

"The blind man!" she cried.

Emma began to laugh - a horrible, frantic, desperate laugh - fancying she saw the beggar's hideous face, a figure of terror looming up in the darkness of eternity.

The wind blew very hard that day
And snatched her petticoat away!

A spasm flung her down on the mattress. Everyone drew close. She had ceased to exist.

He had had such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language. He had no perception - this man of such vast experience - of the dissimilarity of feeling that might underlie similarities of expression. Since he had heard those same words uttered by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them now: the more flowery a person's speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

The law would say that to be patient under calamity is best, and that we should not give way to impatience, as the good and evil in such things are not clear, and nothing is gained by impatience; also, because no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands in the way of that which at the moment is most required.

What is most required? he asked.

That we should take counsel about what has happened, and when the dice have been thrown, according to their fall, order our affairs in the way which reason deems best; not, like children who have had a fall, keeping hold of the part struck and wasting time in setting up a howl, but always accustoming the soul forthwith to apply a remedy, raising up that which is sickly and fallen, banishing the cry of sorrow by the healing art.

Lenny: And Jerry has a crush on you; every time he's looking at you he's mentally undressing you.
Amanda: He is not! That's his normal look.
Lenny: It's not his normal look. If he looked at me like that I'd hit him with a brick.

Sonja: Sex without love is an empty experience.
Boris: But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.

Countess: You're the greatest lover I've ever had.
Boris: Well, I practice a lot on my own.

Love is very deep. Sex only has to go a few inches.

Jamal: They have this writing contest at school. You ever enter one of those?
Forrester: Yes, once.
Jamal: Yeah? Did you win?
Forrester: Of course I won.
Jamal: What, like money or something?
Forrester: The Pulitzer.

Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.
Jerry: How is it a write-off?
Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.
Jerry: You don't even know what a write-off is.
Cosmo Kramer: Do you?
Jerry: No, I don't.
Cosmo Kramer: But they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

Cosmo Kramer : They're trying to screw with your head.
Jerry : Now why would a junior high school want to screw with my head?
Cosmo Kramer : Why does Radio Shack ask for your phone number when you buy batteries? I don't know.

Jerry : I need to talk to you about my friend, Dr. Tim Whatley. I think he's converted to Judaism just for the jokes.
Father Curtis : And this offends you as a Jewish person?
Jerry : No, it offends me as a comedian!

Jerry : I don't trust the guy! I think he regifted, then he degifted, and now he's using an upstairs invite as a springboard to a Superbowl sex romp!

Jerry : You see, Elaine, the key to eating a black and white cookie is that you wanna get some black and some white in each bite. Nothing mixes better than vanilla and chocolate. And yet still somehow racial harmony eludes us. If people would only look to the cookie, all our problems would be solved.

Virginia Woolf: You do not find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

Virginia Woolf: This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness.

The world I see -- you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You climb the wrist-thick vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway.

The things you own end up owning you.

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everything drops to zero.

Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.

Losing all hope is freedom.

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and a finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

Bonasera: I believe in America. America has made my fortune.

Michael Corleone: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay Adams: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed!
Michael Corleone: Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?

Don Corleone: Do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.

Don Corleone: What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you'd come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you.

Don Corleone: Some day - and that day may never come - I will call upon you to do a service for me.

Luca Brozzi is sleeping with the fishes.

Michael Corleone: I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anyone.

"It's dangerous to be an honest man."
"To death."
"Finance is a loaded gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."
"He who brings peace is blessed, for he is a son of God."

Customs official: Do you have anything to declare, sir?
Avi: Yeah. Don't go to England.

Brick Top: In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary... come again?

Turkish: [making tea] Would you like sugar?
Brick Top: No thank you, Turkish; I'm sweet enough.

Brick Top: If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not.

[Tyrone just backed into Franky Four Fingers' van]
Tyrone: I didn't see it.
Vinny: It's a two fucking ton van Tyrone. Its not as though its a bag of fucking peanuts now is it?
Tyrone: It was at a funny angle.
[All three turn and look back at the truck.]
Vinny: It's behind you Tyrone. When you reverse, things come at you from behind.

[After Turkish tells Tommy that he needs a new caravan.]
Tommy: Anyway, what's wrong with this one?
Turkish: Oh, nothing Tommy.
[pulls the door off the hinges]
Turkish: It's tip top. It's just I'm not that sure about the color.

Tyrone: I don't want that dog dribbling on my seats.
Vinny: Your seats? Tyrone, this is a stolen fucking car, mate.

[addressing his troops]
Maximus: If you find yourself alone, riding through green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled, for you are in Elysium, and are already dead.

Maximus: What we do in life echoes in eternity.

Proximo: [addressing his new recruits] I am Proximo! I shall be closer to you for the next few days, which will be the last of your miserable lives, than that bitch of a mother who first brought you screaming into this world! I did not pay good money for your company. I paid it so that I might profit from your death. And just as your mother was there at your beginning, I shall be there at your end. And when you die -- and die you shall -- your transition will be to the sound of...
[claps his hands]
Proximo: Gladiators... I salute you.

Berger: We read five times that you were killed, in five different places.
Victor Laszlo: As you can see, it was true every single time.

Captain Louis Renault: Rick, there are many exit visas sold in this cafe, but we know that you've never sold one. That is the reason we permit you to remain open.
Rick Blaine: Oh? I thought it was because I let you win at roulette.
Captain Louis Renault: That is another reason.

Senor Ferrari: As the leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca, I am an influential and respected man.

Yvonne: Where were you last night?
Rick Blaine: That's so long ago, I don't remember.
Yvonne: Will I see you tonight?
Rick Blaine: I never make plans that far ahead.

Captain Louis Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick Blaine: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Louis Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick Blaine: I was misinformed.

Major Strasser: What is your nationality?
Rick Blaine: I'm a drunkard.
Captain Louis Renault: That makes Rick a citizen of the world.

Rick Blaine: Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Don't knock masturbation -- it's sex with someone you love.

[Alvy addresses a pair of strangers on the street.]
Alvy Singer: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Stranger: Yeah.
Alvy Singer: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Stranger: Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Stranger: And I'm exactly the same way.
Alvy Singer: I see! Wow! That's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something?

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

The food in this place is really terrible. Yes, and such small portions. That's essentially how I feel about life.

Luna Schlosser: Oh, I see. You don't believe in science, and you also don't believe, that political systems work, and you don't believe in God, huh?
Miles Monroe: Right.
Luna Schlosser: So, then what do you believe in?
Miles Monroe: Sex and death.

Doris: You have no values. Your whole life, it's nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, orgasm!
Harry: In France I could run on that slogan and win.

Harry: Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

[On her ex-husband]
Mary Wilke: I was tired of submerging my identity to a very brilliant, dominating man. He's a genius.
Isaac Davis: Oh really, he was a genius, Helen's a genius and Dennis is a genius. You know a lot of geniuses, y'know. You should meet some stupid people once in a while, y'know, you could learn something.

Yale: Your problem is you think you're God.
Isaac Davis: Well, I've got to model myself after someone.

Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.
Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

Isaac Davis: Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Like what... okay...um...For me, ... I would say ... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing...and Wilie Mays... and the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues ... Swedish movies, naturally ... Sentimental Education by Flaubert ... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra ... um ... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh...the crabs at Sam Wo's ... Tracy's face...