Difícilmente puede encontrarse mejor descripción para el conjunto de anotaciones que iré incorporando aquí que el de Work in Progress. No obstante el carácter provisional de esta compilación - y tal vez, de toda compilación - procuraré ser lo más exhaustivo que el espacio me permita respecto a la proveniencia de las citas, asumiendo que en algunos casos, ello es sencillamente imposible. Que os apetezca:
"Pero, ¿qué son las cosas? Nada, como veremos abundantemente, como no sean grupos especiales de cualidades sensibles que para nosotros tienen un interés práctico o estético, y que por eso les damos nombres substantivos y exaltamos su 'status' exclusivo de independencia y dignidad."
William James, Principios de Psicología
"Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male."
Alfred Kinsey
"You refuse me as a slave, you shall have me as a master."
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (Sturrock translation) p. 464
"When one does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity! There is ectasy in an extreme of crime."
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (Sturrock translation) p. 329
"Don’t write “adverse weather conditions will not result in structural degradation.” Just write “the roof won’t leak if it rains.” Get to the point. Say what you mean."
Dean Rieck, 7 Simple Ways to Dramatically Improve Everything You Write
"Mi originalidad (si ésta es la palabra correcta) es, según creo, una originalidad de la tierra, no de la semilla. (Quizá no tengo semilla propia). Se arroja una semilla en mi tierra y crece diferente que en cualquier otro terreno."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Observaciones, p. 72
"Quise creer que podía curar a la gente de aquí con palabras. Ya viste lo que ha sucedido: les gusta su mal, necesitan una llaga familiar que conservan cuidadosamente rascándola con las uñas sucias."
Jean-Paul Sartre, Las Moscas, p. 60
"Pienso que quien no se conmueve ante un objeto encontrado es un perro."
José María Pérez, Álvarez, La soledad de las vocales, p. 127
"En las profecías el exégeta suele ser más importante que el profeta."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aforismos, p.130
"When you have had dinner and come back alone to your room, you have only two choices. You must either read a book or write one."
Clarence B. Randall, Folklore of Management, p. v
"Our scientific respectability keeps us from exercising the mystical portions of our nature freely. "
Willian James, The Energies of Men
"A conservative is a person who has just been mugged. A liberal is a person who has just been arrested."
Sam Harris, In Defense of Torture
"The union of the mathematician with the poet,
fervor with measure,
passion with correctness,
this surely is the ideal."
William James, Collected Essays
"Flesh moves to become spirit.
You were the only one to understand my conversion.
Many people have asked me about God;
my proof is manifestation,
that God can be called
'getting over fear'."
Anne Michaels, Sublimation
"Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;
He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead and gone - I want to live today."
The Divine Comedy, Booklovers
"Si el niño es un sabio inconsciente, el sabio es un niño consciente.
(Un ejemplo de sabio; Lao-Tzu, cuyo nombre significa tanto Viejo Maestro como Niño Viejo)."
Salvador Pániker, Asimetrías
"If you can fill the unforgiving minute/ With sixty seconds' worth of distance run...."
Rudyard Kipling, If
"Even while suffering the torments of oral cancer, Freud refused any pain-killing drugs, saying that 'I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly'."
Steven H. Propp
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"A man cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life - VI. Worship
"Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high."
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
"How did they meet? By chance, like everybody ... Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?"
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
"The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!"
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
"Highly differentiated cultured persons have a strong critical sense, they ask of every- thing the reason why, and they have an irrepressible tendency to be their own lawgivers."
Francis Galton
"The great genius of civilization is that it allows individuals to store memory and operating rules outside of their brains, in the world that surrounds them. The human brain is a sort of central processing unit operating on multiple memory disks, some stored in the head, some in the culture."
Gary Lynch & Richard Granger, What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?
"When you destroy young people's ability to take pleasure in beauty, you are a pervert!"
Camille Paglia, Crisis In The American Universities, 1991
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."
Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930
"Uno escribe en la vida, y después sólo transcribe al papel."
Roberto Musa
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905
"He that has ever so little examined the citations of writers
cannot doubt how little credit the quotations deserve when
the originals are wanting; and consequently how much less
quotations of quotations can be relied on."
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Chapter 16
"With just enough of learning to misquote."
Lord Byron
"Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas."
Aristóteles
"Los libros bien escritos son los únicos que serán leídos por la posteridad. El estilo es el hombre mismo."
Conde de Buffon
"Los detuvieron por atentado al pudor. Y nadie les creyó cuando el hombre y la mujer trataron de explicarse. En realidad, su amor no era sencillo. El padecía claustrofobia, y ella, agorafobia. Era sólo por eso que fornicaban en los umbrales."
Mario Benedetti
"Busch growled something about there being other ways of soul-sharing besides across mucous membranes."
T.J. Bass, Half past Human, p. 103
"Dans ses écrits un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l'enemmi du bien."
Voltaire
"Qui fait une folie, il doit la faire entière."
Régnier
"Avejentados y canosos, pero siempre de un anticonformismo extremo, gustan con locura recibir de una bienal cualquier medalla de oro por una obra elaborada con la más firme voluntad de desagradar a todo el mundo."
Salvador Dalí, Los cornudos del viajo arte moderno, p. 8
"Como es sabido la inteligencia no hace más que conducirnos a las nieblas del escepticismo, y su virtud principal consiste en reducirnos a coeficientes de una incertidumbre gastronómica y supergelatinosa, proustiana y reblandecida."
Salvador Dalí, Los cornudos del viajo arte moderno, p. 17
"La manera más sencilla de negarse a hacer concesiones al oro es poseerlo uno mismo."
Salvador Dalí, Los cornudos del viajo arte moderno, p.93
