Claudia's quotes

(showing 1-42 of 42)

"Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: ego, fame, openness, patience, receptivity
2 people liked it

"The only journey is the one within."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: journey, within
1 person liked it

"An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: definitions, finite, joy, laughter, questions
6 people liked it

"'One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.'"
— E.M. Forster

tags: intellectuals, live, nothing, ordinary
1 person liked it

"Love does not dominate; it cultivates."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: love
1 person liked it

"Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: nervous, people, talk, weather
2 people liked it

"She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her `Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir. "
— Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers)

tags: frog, mind, ode, poetry, soul
1 person liked it

"Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

tags: chords, edge, emptiness, loop, signs, space, substance, world
4 people liked it

"Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?"
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

tags: coquette, exhaustion, flirtation, friendship, intimacy
2 people liked it

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism
5,216 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,744 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,855 people liked it

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

tags: memories
277 people liked it

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

tags: aloneness, love
82 people liked it

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

66 people liked it

". . .suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape"
— Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

20 people liked it

""I must do something or I shall wear my heart away..."
"
— Charles Dickens

tags: action, heart
6 people liked it

". . . it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself."
— Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

4 people liked it

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

497 people liked it

"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

118 people liked it

"Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated by a watch."
— Jane Austen

tags: attack, time, watch
1 person liked it

"Stand and face me, my love,
and scatter the grace in your eyes.
"
— Sappho (Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho)

tags: handsome, love, man
3 people liked it

"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: author, child, genius
1 person liked it

"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: matter, stories, style
1 person liked it

"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

-excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems"
— e.e. cummings

tags: poetry
71 people liked it

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."
— e.e. cummings

64 people liked it

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

tags: friends, friendship
9,764 people liked it

"Some people have a way with words....some people....not have way."
— Steve Martin (Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life)

tags: humor
179 people liked it

"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To case upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!"
— John Keats

12 people liked it

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."
— John Keats

tags: music
80 people liked it

"the hardest thing is to be yourself in a world that is trying it's best, day and night, to make you like everyone else."
— e.e. cummings

7 people liked it

"somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence; in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near"
— e.e. cummings

5 people liked it

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

tags: james, joyce, ulysses
54 people liked it

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

9 people liked it

"Love loves to love love."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

7 people liked it

"Me. And me now."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

5 people liked it

"Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

13 people liked it

"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."
— James Joyce

tags: ulysses
10 people liked it

"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
— James Joyce (The Dead)

tags: love
39 people liked it

"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
— James Joyce

22 people liked it

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

tags: bookroom, books, wisdom
1,403 people liked it