vorona > vorona's Quotes

“There is something spectral about me - and this is both the good and the bad in me - something that makes it impossible for anyone to endure having to see me every day and thus have a real relationship with me. Of course, in the light cloak in which I generally show myself, it is another matter. But at home it would be noted that I fundamentally dwell in a spirit world. I had been engaged to her for 1 year, and she did not really know me. - So she would have been shattered. In turn, she would probably have made a mess of me, for I was constantly overstraining myself with her because in a certain sense reality was too light. I was too heavy for her, and she was too light for me, but both can truly lead to overstraining myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11 - NB14

“Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

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

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.”
― Emil Cioran

“I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.”
― E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“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

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

“One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“apprendre une langue, c’est vivre de nouveau”
― French proverb

“Medicine, and Law, and Philosophy -
You've worked your way through every school,
Even, God help you, Theology,
And sweated at it like a fool.
Why labour at it any more?
You're no wiser now than you were before.
You're Master of Arts, and Doctor too,
And for ten years all you've been able to do
Is lead your students a fearful dance
Through a maze of error and ignorance.
And all this misery goes to show
There's nothing we can ever know.
Oh yes you're brighter than all those relics,
Professors and Doctors, scribblers and clerics,
No doubts or scruples to trouble you,
Defying hell, and the Devil too.
But there's no joy in self-delusion;
Your search for truth ends in confusion.
Don't imagine your teaching will ever raise
The minds of men or change their ways.
And as for worldly wealth, you have none -
What honour or glory have you won?
A dog could stand this life no more.
And so I've turned to magic lore;
The spirit message of this art
Some secret knowledge might impart.
No longer shall I sweat to teach
What always lay beyond my reach;
I'll know what makes the world revolve,
Its mysteries resolve,
No more in empty words I'll deal -
Creation's wellsprings I'll reveal!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, and the Urfaust

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either - Or

“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. ... In the real world, all rests on perseverance.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
― Baruch de Spinoza, Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte

“Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“God commands all the birds of the heavens to devour the flesh of the princes and commands the wild animals to drink the blood of the mighty ones.”
― Thomas Muntzer