Books

Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes

My favorite quotes from the book Flowers for Algernon by Darren Hardy which I rated 5/5 on my Goodreads account. Lately, I haven’t been reading any nonfiction books, but this was a great one to start with again.

Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

It’s easy to make friends if you let people laugh at you.

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I’ve discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.

Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything – all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time?

There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.

No one really starts anything new, Mrs. Nemur. Everyone builds on other men’s failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.

 …the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.

Written by Nikola Brežnjak