Leszek Quotes

#1. Duke Leszek the White explained in a long letter to the Pope that neither he nor any self-respecting Polish knight could be induced to go to the Holy Land, where, they had been informed, there was no wine, mead, or even beer to be had.

Adam Zamoyski

#2. There never has been devised, and there never will be devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success - the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of unflinching will.

Theodore Roosevelt

#3. When I began to act, I was about 6 years old. Everything you learned, every period of history you studied, you did a play about it.

Marian Seldes

#4. Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and china.

Charles Dickens

#5. No victory is irreversible, no defeat is definitive. That is what makes life worth living.

Leszek Kolakowski

#6. The S.B.A. does not lend directly to businesses, but instead backs loans to encourage banks to invest in small businesses as part of a nearly $90 billion portfolio.

Karen Mills

#7. What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.

Esther Perel

#8. I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer - especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics.

Leszek Kolakowski

#9. Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.

Leszek Kolakowski

#10. Giving a child an education is by far one of the most important investments we can make.

Usher

#11. I was then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues).

Leszek Kolakowski

#12. A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

Leszek Kolakowski

#13. For any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a shortage
of arguments by which to support it.

Leszek Kolakowski

#14. We really have no right to reproach God for having created the world. For Him it was the only possible way of escaping from the accursed void in which He found himself.

Leszek Kolakowski

#15. Tragedy is not the second face of the life; but it is the very first face of it!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#16. We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

Leszek Kolakowski

#17. Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought - to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning.

Leszek Kolakowski