Book Quotes

I read quite a lot. Not nearly as much as some people, but I’m trying. This is where I post my favourites quotes from the books I’ve read. It will be updated regularly, so check back often if you’re interested.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

Concentrate every minute like a Roman – like a man – on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can – if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it – not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. Why treat the one as a misfortune rather than the other as fortunate? Can you really call something a misfortune that doesn’t violate human nature? Or do you think something that’s not against nature’s will can violate it? But you know what will is. Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself? So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work – as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for – the things I was brought into this world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? -But it’s nicer here… So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you doing what your nature demands? ‘- But we have to sleep sometime…’ Agreed. But nature set a limit on that – as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human – however imperfectly – and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked upon.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

Is it not possible that a real man should forget about living a certain number of years, and should not cling to life, but leave it up to the gods, accepting, as women say, that ‘no one can escape his fate,’ and turn his attention to how he can best live the life before him?
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

Learn to ask of all actions, ‘Why are they doing that?’ Starting with your own.
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations

“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.
“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That is the world’s greatest lie.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“The Soul of the World is nourished by people’s happiness. And also by unhappiness, envy, and jealousy. To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation. All things are one. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked, when they had made camp that day.
“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”
“But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks many things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I’m thinking about her.”
“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I’ve discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“If a person is living out his destiny, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

“This is why alchemy exists,” the boy said. “So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everthing around us becomes better, too.”
Paulo Coehlo
The Alchemist

The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion ‘is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith.’
Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon, Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one God further.
Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

Malcolm’s life finally demonstrates difficult and perennially unfashionable notion that people are not fixed or closed products of their circumstances.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Children have a lesson adults needs to learn, to not be ashamed of falling, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so “safe”, and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to go to jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life – that any time you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business – you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.’
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

‘Don’t condemn if you see a person has a glass of dirty water,’ [Mr Muhammed] said, ‘just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.’
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

It’s easy to cry when you realise that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. You wake up, and that’s enough.
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

Most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight. After a few fights, you’re afraid a lot less.
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

This isn’t a seminar. ‘If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom,’ Tyler says, ‘you’ll never really succeed.’ Only after disaster can we be resurrected. ‘It’s only after you’ve lost everything,’ Tyler says, ‘that you’re free to do anything.’
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

‘Getting fired,’ Tyler says, ‘is the best thing that could ever happen to any of us. That way we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.’
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

‘You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives.’
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose.
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

As a boy I instinctively understood the ground, the march, the occasion, and the elements. I comprehended the crossing of rivers and the exploitation of terrain; how many units of what composition may traverse such and such a distance, how swiftly, bearing how much kit, arriving in what condition to fight. The drawing up of troops came as second nature to me: I simply looked; all showed itself clear. My father was the greatest soldier of his day, perhaps the greatest ever. Yet when I was ten I informed him that I would excel him. By twenty-three I had done so.
Steven Pressfield
The Virtues of War

In strategy and tactics, even in valour, other commanders may be my equal. But in this, none surpasses me: the measure of my love for my comrades. I love even those who call themselves my enemies. Alone meanness and malice I despise. But to the foe who stands with gallantry, him I draw to my breast, dear as a brother.
Steven Pressfield
The Virtues of War

‘He is not me,’ I have said, ‘but a creature to whom I am bound. It is as if this thing called “Alexander” has been twinned with me at birth, fully formed, and that I only now discover it, aspect by aspect, as I grow. This “Alexander” is greater than I. Crueller than I. He knows rages I cannot fathom and dreams beyond what my heart can compass. He is cold and canny, brilliant and ruthless and without fear. He is inhuman. A monster indeed, not as Achilles was, or Agamemnon, both of whom were blind to their own monstrousness. No, this “Alexander” knows what he is, and of what he is capable. He is I, more than I myself, and I am indivisible from him. I fear I must become him, or be consumed by him.’
Steven Pressfield
The Virtues of War

I realized I could forgive any crime – murder, betrayal, treason – but not doubt. Not doubt of my destiny. This could never be forgiven.
Steven Pressfield
The Virtues of War

Immediately my anger turned upon myself. I alone am master of my life! I vowed in that instant not only to dedicate myself to the study of horses and horsemanship, to make myself without peer as cavalryman and cavalry officer, but to educate myself in all things, to become my own tutor, selecting the subjects I needed to master and seeking instruction on my own.
Steven Pressfield
The Virtues of War

He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself, proclaim your friendship. And then, no matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way of a solution of that man’s woe.
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

Don Corleone received everyone – rich and poor, powerful and humble – with an equal show of love. He slighted no one. That was his character.
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me to help.”
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

“You know those Arctic explorers who leave caches of food scattered on the route to the North Pole? Just in case they may need them someday? Those are my father’s favors.”
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

“Tom, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning his a friend of his the old man would take it personal.”
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

He remembered what his Godfather had said, that he could make his own life what he wanted. Great chance if you knew what you wanted. But what did he want?
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

A system of payoffs was set up and soon the Corleone organisation had a sizeable “sheet”, the list of officials entitled to a monthly sum. When the lawyer tried to keep this list down, apologizing for the expense, Vito Corleone reassured him. “No, no,” he said. “Get everyone on it even if they can’t help us right now. I believe in friendship and I am willing to show my friendship first.”
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

He claimed that there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

The policeman believes in law and order in a curiously innocent way. He believes in it more than does the public he serves. Law and order is, after all, the magic from which he derives his power, individual power which he cherishes as nearly all men cherish individual power. And yet there is always the smoldering resentment against the public he serves. They are at the same time his ward and his prey. As wards they are ungrateful, abusive and demanding. As prey they are slippery and dangerous, full of guile.
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

When I look back on my teenage years, I have one major regret, and it has nothing to do with not studying hard enough, not being nice to my mother, or crashing my father’s car into a public bus. It is simply that I didn’t fool around with enough girls. I am a deep man – I reread James Joyce’s Ulyssess every three years for fun. I consider myself reasonably intuitive. I am at the core a good person, and I try to avoid hurting others. But I can’t seem to evolve to the next state of being because I spend far too much time thinking about women.
Neil Strauss
The Game

It is no easy feat to sign up for a workshop dedicated to picking up women. To do so is to acknowledge defeat, inferiority, and inadequacy. It is to finally admit to yourself that after all these years of being sexually active (or at least sexually cognizant), you have not grown up and figured it out. Those who ask for help are often those who have failed to do something for themselves. So if drug addicts go to rehab and the violent go to anger management class, then social retards go to pickup school.
Neil Strauss
The Game

I still had my own conscience to deal with. This was, far and away, the most pathetic thing I’d ever done in my life. And unfortunately – as opposed to, say, masturbating in the shower – it wasn’t something I could do alone. Mystery and the other students would be there to bear witness to my shame, my secret, my inadequacy. A man has two primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex. Half of life then was out of order. To go before them was to stand up as a man and admit that I was only half a man.
Neil Strauss
The Game

Perhaps signing up for Mystery’s workshop had been an intelligent decision. After all, at least I was doing something proactive about my lameness. Even the wise man dwells in the fool’s paradise.
Neil Strauss
The Game

One of the tragedies of modern life is that women as a whole do not hold a lot of power in society, despite all the advances made in the last century. Sexual choice, however, is one of the only areas where women are indisputably in control. It’s not until they’ve made a choice, and submitted to it, that the relationship is inverted – and the man is generally back in a position of power over her. Perhaps that is why women, to the frustration of men everywhere, are so cautious about saying yes.
Neil Strauss
The Game

In order to excel at anything, there are always hurdles, obstacles, or challenges one must get past. It’s what bodybuilders call the pain period. Those who push themselves, and are willing to face pain, exhausation, humiliation, rejection, or worse, are the ones who becomechampions. The rest are left on the sidelines.
Neil Strauss
The Game

In life, people tend to wait for good things to come to them. And by waiting, they miss out. Usually, what you wish for doesn’t fall in your lap; it falls somewhere nearby, and you have to recognize it, stand up, and put in the time and work it takes to get it. This isn’t because the universe is cruel. It’s because the universe is smart. It has its own cat-string theory and knows we don’t appreciate things that fall into our laps.
Neil Strauss
The Game

Now, when I walked into a club, I felt a rush of power, wondering which woman would have her tongue down my throat within a half hour. For all the self-improvement books I had read, I still wasn’t above shallow validation-seeking. None of us were. That’s why we were in the game. Sex wasn’t about getting our rocks off; it was about being accepted.
Neil Strauss
The Game

There are certain bad habits we’ve groomed our whole life – from personality flaws to fashion faux pas. And it has been the role of parents and friends, outside of some minor tweaking, to reinforce the belief that we’re okay just as we are. But it’s not enough to just be yourself. You have to be your best self. And that’s a tall order if you haven’t found your best self yet.
Neil Strauss
The Game

We corrected his every gesture, phrase, and item of clothing because we knew he wasn’t living up to his potential. None of us is. We get stuck in old thought and behaviour patterns that may have been effective when we were twelve months or twelve years old, but now only serve to hold us back. And, while those around us may have no problem correcting our minor flaws, they let the big ones slide, because it would mean attacking who we are.
Neil Strauss
The Game

I suppose we were all searching for someone to teach us the moves we needed to win at life, the knightly code of conduct, the ways of the alpha-male. That’s why we found each other. But a sequence of maneuvers and a system of behaviour would never fix what was broken inside. Nothing would fix what was broken inside. All we could do was embrace the damage.
Neil Strauss
The Game

We were all searching outside of ourselves for our missing pieces, and we were all looking in the wrong direction. Instead of finding ourselves, we’d lost our sense of self. Mystery didn’t have the answers. A blonde 10 in a two-set at the Standard didn’t have the answers. The answers were to be found within. To win the game was to leave it.
Neil Strauss
The Game

I suddenly realised that every moment of tedium, every disappointment, let-down or sadness I’d ever felt…every moment of depression or boredom or blues, every hung-over Sunday, every heartbroken Monday…each of those moments was one trillion times better than no moment at all. Life was for living.
Danny Wallace
Friends Like These

Fate did not hand Genghis Khan his destiny; he made it for himself.
Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Already, at this young age, Temujin played the game of life, not merely for honor or prestige, but to win. He stalked his brother as if he were hunting an animal, just as he would later prove to have a genius for converting hunting skills into war tactics. By putting Khasar, who was the better shot, in front while he took the rear, he also showed his tactical acumen. Like the horse that must be first in every race, Temujin had determined he would lead, not follow. In order to achieve this primacy of place, he proved himself willing to violate custom, defy his mother, and kill whoever blocked his path, even if it was his own family member.
Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

He tried to teach them that the first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion, and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that ‘if you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.’ He admonished them never to think of themselves as the strongest or smartest. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it.
Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World