Q0350Pride goes before a fall.
From the Book of Proverbs. Overconfidence blinds us to danger, so arrogance tends to come right before the stumble it didn't see coming.
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Q0350Q0351There is nothing new under the sun.
From Ecclesiastes. Human striving repeats across the ages; our struggles and desires echo those of everyone before us — there is nothing new under the sun.
Q0352The truth will set you free.
From the Gospel of John. In its context it speaks of spiritual freedom, but it has become a wider maxim: facing the truth, however hard, is what frees us.
Q0353I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or a Jew.
This line is usually encountered through modern English Hafez renderings rather than a literal, manuscript-secure translation from the Divan. That matters because Hafez is often expanded in English into universal spiritual aphorism. The feeling is faithful to his ecstatic openness: divine encounter can loosen the borders of religious identity without emptying devotion of depth.
Q0354You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.
From Kafka's novel The Trial (written 1914–15, published posthumously in 1925). In the cathedral scene, a priest tells Josef K. the parable 'Before the Law', and this line comes from their duel over its interpretation: the text is fixed, but the commentaries around it multiply endlessly. Kafka turns it into a warning about opinion itself — often it is not insight but anxiety wearing the costume of authority.
Q0355The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.
Attributed to the philosopher Leo Strauss. A wise person's silence is never empty; it can hold judgement, restraint or a meaning louder than speech.
Q0356I've had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can't quite make out what it is. It takes time.
Widely attached to Bukowski, though no book or poem citation has been confirmed. The image is powerful because it is not about romantic pain but damaged perception: after enough harm, kindness itself arrives looking unfamiliar, almost unreadable. It takes time, the line admits — and that admission is the hopeful part.
Q0357Baby, I'm a genius, but nobody knows it but me.
From Bukowski's novel Factotum (1975), spoken by his alter ego Henry Chinaski. It is funny because it is both swagger and self-parody: the drunk, unemployable drifter still guards the secret conviction that his inner life is larger than the world can see. Fifty years on, half the internet quotes Chinaski's boast without the irony — which would have amused Bukowski greatly.
Q0358Before you were dust, the world turned without you. After you are dust, it will turn again. So be kind while you are briefly here.
A modern verse written in the manner of the Rubáiyát — not a translation of any quatrain. The Rubáiyát is a set of Persian quatrains attributed to the poet-mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), which reached the West through Edward FitzGerald's free rendering of 1859. Its recurring turn is the one this line borrows: the past is spent, tomorrow is unpromised, and the hour in your hands is the only one you own.
Q0359There was no fight left in me. Not because I was weak, but because nothing felt worth the effort. I didn't give up. I drifted out.
This should not be presented as a verified Kafka quotation. It is a modern Kafkaesque reflection: the emotional truth is exhaustion that does not announce itself as dramatic collapse, but as a quiet slipping away from effort, desire, and narrative.
Q0360A lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honourable way to go.
From Hunter S. Thompson, pioneer of gonzo journalism. He reclaims 'freak' as a badge of honour — a refusal to shrink yourself to fit a narrow world.
Q0361Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
The joke is widely credited to Oscar Wilde, though the precise first source is slippery. It survives because it is perfectly Wildean in shape: a social compliment turned inside out, polished enough to sound civil while the blade is already in.
Q0362I hate those who steal my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
This line is popular online under Nietzsche's name, but it does not have a secure work citation here. Its idea is Nietzschean enough to keep with caution: solitude is not emptiness. It is a chosen intensity, and shallow company can feel like theft when it gives only noise in return.
Q0363Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
This is traced to Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in a passage about encountering foreign collective psyches and one's own limits. In app terms, it is not a simple 'others are mirrors' slogan; irritation can reveal the edge where our own assumptions, projections, and blind spots begin.
Q0364I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness. A real, thorough sickness.
This is from Notes from Underground, where the narrator turns self-awareness into both weapon and wound. Dostoevsky is not praising ignorance; he is showing how consciousness without action can become a fever, endlessly analysing life instead of entering it.
Q0365Right or wrong, it is very pleasant to break something from time to time.
Often attached to Dostoevsky; the sourcing is genuinely tangled — versions are variously tied to his notebooks and journalism, and no single passage has settled the question. As a provocation it is worthy of him: destruction can feel like proof that the self still has force. His Notes from Underground built an entire narrator out of exactly that appetite.
Q0366Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth. Nothing is easier than flattery.
From Crime and Punishment (1866) — the words of Svidrigailov, one of literature's most unsettling charmers, in conversation with Raskolnikov. Some translations render it with 'candour' instead of 'speaking the truth.' The observation is social, not abstract: truth must be tuned precisely to be heard at all, while flattery can be entirely false and still please. That asymmetry explains much of public life.
Q0367Man only likes to count his troubles. He doesn't calculate his happiness.
This comes from Notes from Underground, in the narrator's conversation with Liza. Dostoevsky turns a psychological habit into a moral warning: suffering is counted carefully, while happiness is often left unmeasured and therefore unnoticed.
Q0368To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.
This is Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment, defending the dignity of one's own mistakes. The line is not anti-truth; it argues that borrowed correctness can shrink a person, while even error can teach if it is honestly one's own.
Q0369But how could you live and have no story to tell?
This is usually linked to White Nights, Dostoevsky's early sentimental story of a dreamer and Nastenka. The line asks for more than dramatic biography: to have a story is to have noticed your own life deeply enough to tell what longing, mistake, and hope did to you.
Q0370A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
This is from The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevsky refuses the easy phrase 'bestial cruelty.' His point is darker: animals do not aestheticise cruelty. Human beings can make harm deliberate, theatrical, and intellectually justified.
Q0371If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
From Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Control, he suggests, works by framing the questions: steer what people ask, and you needn't fear their answers.
Q0372In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied.
Lincoln wrote this to Mary Todd Lincoln on April 16, 1848, while serving in Congress and feeling the loneliness of Washington. In context it is domestic, almost tender: when Mary was there, she interrupted his work; when she was gone, work without her felt tasteless.
Q0373The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.
From My Autobiography (1964). Chaplin grew up in severe South London poverty — workhouses, a mother committed to an asylum, nights without food — and became one of the wealthiest entertainers alive. The sentence guards against comfort's amnesia: to get used to luxury is to forget what most of the world's days actually feel like.