utopia & reality / land of quotes

"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves."
— Martin Buber (Paths in Utopia)

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting."
— Robert Silverberg

"Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
— Philip K. Dick (I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon)

"Reality is frequently inaccurate."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them."
— Anaïs Nin

"Always remember, your focus determines your reality."
— George Lucas

"Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like."
— Laozi

"It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart."
— Haruki Murakami