Shrug Quotes

“Matt shrugged. It was a good shrug, too. All it was missing was a beret, a stripy shirt and a Gauloise cigarette.”

“He knew that the dread in these men’s minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it—as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.”

“No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists.”

“What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.”

“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.”

“They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man’s self-abdication.”

“The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.”

“It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.”

“The source of work? Man’s mind...man’s reasoning mind.”