Quotes from books
(page 4)
Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.
But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony. Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
What makes the desert beautiful, is that somewhere it hides a well.
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.
The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.
I felt like a moth in a chandelier — all at once there were lots of pretty choices, but I wasn't quite sure where to fly.
Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.
Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place.
If somebody wants a sheep, that is a proof that one exists.
- One must command from each what each can perform. Authority is based first of all upon reason. If you command your subjects to jump into the ocean, there will be a revolution. I am entitled to command obedience because my orders are reasonable.
- Then my sunset?
- You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But I shall wait, according to my science of government, until conditions are favorable.
- And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...
- What a stupid lamb...
- What a sick, masochistic lion...
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
Augustus William Hare, Julius Charles Hare, "Guesses at Truth"
Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it carefully.
The flower had once seen a caravan passing.
- Men? I think there are six or seven of them in existence. I saw them, several years ago. But one never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their lives very difficult.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.
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