Daša > Daša's Quotes

“I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”
― Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.”
― Karl Kraus

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
― Socrates

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through thick life without fear.

For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

Deep in the transparent night they're still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.

― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems (NYRB Classics; 1st edition, August 31, 2004) Originally published 1972”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day.”
― Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, Vol. 1

“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“The future has an ancient heart.”
― Carlo Levi

“Čovječe, sjeti se da si ravan onome pred kim se ponizuješ, i ne ponizuj se! Hodaj uspravno, ne plači pred tuđim vratima, jer iza tih vrata za tebe nema nikoga, pljusni i pljuni, ali se ne ponizuj.”
― Miroslav Krleža, Gospoda Glembajevi

“Što bi čovjek gluhima tumačio glazbu?”
― Miroslav Krleža, The Return of Philip Latinowicz

“Istina je: bio sam prilično sam ali osamljenost još uvijek nije dokaz da čovjek nema pravo”
― Miroslav Krleža, On the Edge of Reason

“Sami lopovi vrve svijetom, kao crvi u crvljivom mesu: sumnja velika i nepovjerenje na sve strane, a i dobro da je tako, jer je čovjek rođen kao lopov!”
― Miroslav Krleža, The Return of Philip Latinowicz

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Двести лет вместе

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956