Too early for my memoirs (3)

I am quite interested in collecting quotations. Over the years, I have collected a small number of relevant quotes on my Facebook profile page. In a way, they represent my perception of life, reality, literature... There is some Jefferson, Hemingway, lots of Camus and Sartre, some Thoreau and Emerson (I think Andy and Martha will enjoy)... Like I said, it's not much. Read them, skim through them and I'm sure you'll recognize a good deal of them.

Dimitri's FB quotes

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."

-- Frederick Douglass, United States, 1857

"I never let schooling get in the way of my education."

-- Mark Twain, United States

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

-- Francis Bacon, United Kingdom

"We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."

-- Thomas Jefferson, United States, 1820

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."

-- Ernest Hemingway, France, 1924

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true."

-- Ernest Hemingway, Cuba, 1954

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, United States, 1841

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."

-- Henry David Thoreau, United States, 1854

"From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I loved, I loved alone."

-- Edgar Allen Poe, United States, 1829

"I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, France, 1951

"We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, France, 1946

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, France, 1943

"Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, France, 1943

"At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter — these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable."

-- Albert Camus, France, 1942

"I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?"

-- Albert Camus, France, 1942

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

-- Albert Camus, France

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

-- Albert Camus, France, 1942