Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

The first step toward becoming extraordinary is, of course, to stop being ordinary.

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.

No, scratch the word "career." Careers are for people who wish to advance. I only want to survive, draw a paycheck.

What's important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What's important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.

I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work.

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reigns.

I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.

We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

Christ by his death destroying the works of the devil, procuring the Spirit for us, hath so killed sin, as to its reign in believers, that it shall not obtain its end and dominion.

Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.

Everyone is constantly transitioning.

The problem is a lot of people don't think. The general bloke just goes through life, gets a job, gets married and all that, and that's it.

One of the sad realities today is that very few people, especially young people, read books. Unless we can find imaginative ways of addressing this reality, future generations are in danger of losing their history.

[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

Be warned against all 'good' advice because 'good' advice is necessarily 'safe' advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility--one of the crushing problems of our time.

We are all in the process of becoming.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

I'd have to say that muaythai is something special. It's really demanding and it's becoming popular all around the world.