Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
God is our true Friend, who always gives us the counsel and comfort we need. Our danger lies in resisting Him; so it is essential that we acquire the habit of hearkening to His voice, or keeping silence within, and listening so as to lose nothing of what He says to us.
Summe up at night what thou hast done by day; And in the morning what thou hast to do. Dresse and undresse thy soul; mark the decay And growth of it; if, with thy watch, that too Be down then winde up both; since we shall be Most surely judg'd, make thy accounts agree.
It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.
So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.
A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern.
It is because everything is relative That we shall never see in that sphere of pure wisdom and Entertainment much more than groping shadows of an incomplete Former existence so close it burns like the mouth that Closes down over all your effort like the moment Of death
I hid my love when young till I Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly; I hid my life to my despite Till I could not bear to look at light: I dare not gaze upon her face But left her memory in each place; Where'er I saw a wild flower lie I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud With white neck peering to the evening clowd. The weary rooks to distant woods are gone. With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow While small birds nestle in the edge below.
That, if the Gentiles, (whom no Law inspir'd,) By Nature did what was by Law requir'd; They, who the written Rule and never known, Were to themselves both Rule and Law alone: To Natures plain Indictment they shall plead; And, by their Conscience, be condemn'd or freed.
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.
I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.
Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn't care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.
Though sands be black and bitter black the sea, Night lie before me and behind me night, And God within far Heaven refuse to light The consolation of the dawn for me,-- Between the shadowy burns of Heaven and Hell, It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell With memory.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles, and she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.
I often get asked by people 'Is your Twitter real?' and things of that nature. I'm never sure how to respond to that. My Twitter account is completely 'real' in that everything I tweet is something I have earnestly thought or something that has actually happened to me.
Old age doth in sharp pains abound; We are belabored by the gout, Our blindness is a dark profound, Our deafness each one laughs about. Then reason's light with falling ray Doth but a trembling flicker cast. Honor to age, ye children pay! Alas! my fifty years are past!
We are like vessels tossed on the bosom of the deep; our passions are the winds that sweep us impetuously forward; each pleasure is a rock; the whole life is a wide ocean. Reason is the pilot to guide us, but often allows itself to be led astray by the storms of pride.
To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.
Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.
Buying, possessing, accumulating--this is not worldliness. But doing this in the love of it, with no love of God paramount--doing it so that thoughts of eternity and God are an intrusion--doing it so that one's spirit is secularized in the process; this is worldliness.
Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn't resolve the question of whether it's true or not. I can see the temptation of simply thinking, 'Well, there's a cultural mainstream which flows neatly in one direction. You just align with it'. And that really won't do.
Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.
For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone's particular range of psychological afflictions.
My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.
Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen physical or psychological wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.
And every stone and every star a tongue, And every gale of wind a curious song. The Heavens were an oracle, and spoke Divinity: the Earth did undertake The office of a priest; and I being dumb (Nothing besides was dumb) all things did come With voices and instructions.
This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.
In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.
Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.
Keep your face always toward the sunshine everything could be worse but isn't and so we are justified in being grateful - and shadows everything could be better but isn't and so it is easy to be bitter 'unless you decide to look on the bright side will fall behind you.
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest, And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe; And all the daughters of the year shall dance! Sing now the lusty song of fruit and flowers.
Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.
Before I take my last breath, before my last flower withers, I wish to live, I wish to make love, I wish to be in this world close to those who need me, those who I need, in order to learn, comprehend and rediscover that I can be and I want to be better at every moment.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow, Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle, Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town and History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.
[Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag."
When May, with cowslip-braided locks, Walks through the land in green attire. And burns in meadow-grass the phlox His torch of purple fire: And when the punctual May arrives, With cowslip-garland on her brow, We know what once she gave our lives, And cannot give us now!
The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word 'Arya,' meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history.
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Enough of satire; in less harden'd times Great was her force, and mighty were her rhymes. I've read of men, beyond man's daring brave, Who yet have trembled at the strokes she gave; Whose souls have felt more terrible alarms From her one line, than from a world in arms.
Where the light is, and each thing clear,Separate from all others, standing in its place,I drink the time and touch whatever's near,And hope for day when the whole world has that face:For what assures her present every year?In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.
A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of.
Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.