Democritus Quotes

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.

Have you ever sabotaged yourself? Ever come close to victory only to slide back into the jaws of defeat? When you are fighting yourself, you can't win.

Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I'm a failure.

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

I am actually incredibly contented and jolly. But, and I have no idea why this is, I have a really strong empathy with all kinds of warped and destructive modes of thinking. I don't know why, but those things co-exist.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

Man has no greater enemy than himself.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.

I both love and do not love; and am mad and not mad.

I'm in competition with myself and I'm losing.

I fully embrace myself as a hypocrite.

I get in my own head, and at the end of the day, I'm my biggest critic, and I'm my worst enemy, too.

When you're at war with yourself, you will go under.

I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes.

Ever since I was a little kid, there was something about change that scared me so much, but, at the same time, I've always been terrified of being stuck, so it's kind of like a paradox that I'm living.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

The mind at war with itself does war with any other mind, and that produces war in the world - all of it.

What man in his right mind would conspire his own hurt? Men are beside themselves when they transgress against their convictions.

The body is telling the mind to stop. The mind is telling the body to shut up.

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.