Top 273 Quotes & Sayings by David Mitchell - Page 2

You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.

By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

Reality is the page. Life is the word.

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.

Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.

This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

If I want to act relaxed, it's going to take all my cunning, skill, and concentration.

Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.

Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It’s simply part of being human.

I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?

Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.

These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.

Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

One's ribs shouldn't be prison bars.

Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up.

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.

The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Hate eats the hater the way ogres eat little boys.

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.