Rod > Rod's Quotes

“The only freedom is the freedom from the known.”
― Krishnamurti

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of multiple selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my "madness," but I meant the madness of the poets.”
― Anais Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”
― Anais Nin

“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
― anaïs nin

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.”
― La Bruyere

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
― William Hazlitt

“Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.”
― Samuel Johnson

“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.”
― Aleksander Pushkin

“Reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye in time is accommodated to darkness.”
― Samuel Johnson

“That soul that can reflect upon itself, consider itself, is more than so.”
― John Donne

“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

“Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“That's what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.”
― Charles Bukowski

“An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.”
― Henri Frederic Amiel

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
― Samuel Beckett

“You have enchanted me
with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language”
― Kenneth Koch

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“No one can crave what truly harms him.”
― Franz Kafka

“He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.”
― Franz Kafka

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”
― Theodore Roethke, The Far Field

“Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory