Sinch > Sinch's Quotes

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life — but what I will call the artistic life — if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
― Stephen Fry

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
― John Quincy Adams

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“You’re born with the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
― Bob Dylan

“Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It’s best to keep that all inside.”
― Bob Dylan, The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-1966

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”
― Walt Whitman

“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“There is no work of art that could not have been more perfect. Read line by line, no poem, however great, has no single line that could not be improved upon, no episode that could not be more intense, and the whole is never so perfect that it could not be even more perfect.
Woe betide the artist who notices this, who one day thinks this. His work can never again be a joy, he will never again sleep peacefully. He’ll become a young man bereft of youth and grow old discontentedly.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Only abstention is noble and lofty, because it is an acknowledgement that any work we might produce is inevitably inferior, the physical article is always the grotesque shadow of the dreamed work.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Let us create theories and think them through patiently and honestly, only to contradict them by our actions, and to justify those actions with theories that condemn our earlier theories... Let us carve out a path in life and then immediately take another contrary path. Let us adopt all the gestures and all the attitudes of something that we neither are nor want to be, nor even want to be thought to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-making role in the antinuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible than that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes. He could only see his own face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of seeing his own face. The creator of the mirror poisoned the human soul.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I open the window. Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Where there is form there is a soul.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Disasters in novels are always beautiful because no real blood is shed in them, nor do the dead rot; in novels, not even rottenness is rotten.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Civilizations appear only to exist in order to produce art and literature, for what speaks of them, what remains of them, are words.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason?
I am a Jew.
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Whoever shall be guided so far towards the mysteries of love, by contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order, is approaching the last grade. Suddenly he will behold a beauty marvellous in its nature, that very Beauty, Socrates, for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born nor perishing, neither increasing nor diminishing; secondly, not beautiful here and ugly there, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful in one direction and ugly in another direction, not beautiful in one place and ugly in another place. Again, this beauty will not show itself like a face or hands or any bodily thing at all, nor as a discourse or a science, nor indeed as residing in anything, as in a living creature or in earth or heaven or anything else, but being by itself with itself always in simplicity; while all the beautiful things elsewhere partake of this beauty in such manner, that when they are born and perish it becomes neither less nor more and nothing at all happens to it...”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver