Ula > Ula's Quotes

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  • #1
    Italo Calvino
    “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
    Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  • #2
    William Faulkner
    “There is no such thing as was-only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”
    Faulkner

  • #3
    Julian Barnes
    “May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.”
    Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

  • #4
    Julian Barnes
    “Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary”
    Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

  • #5
    Primo Levi
    “Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
    Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

  • #6
    Marcel Proust
    “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
    Proust-M

  • #7
    Elie Wiesel
    “Questions outlive the answers.”
    Elie Weisel

  • #8
    Augustine of Hippo
    “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”
    St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

  • #9
    Jacques Lacan
    “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”
    Jacques Lacan

  • #10
    Allen Ginsberg
    “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
    Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
    The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
    The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
    and asshole holy!
    Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
    holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
    angel!
    The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
    holy as you my soul are holy!
    The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
    holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
    Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
    Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
    sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
    beggars holy the hideous human angels!
    Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
    of the grandfathers of Kansas!
    Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
    apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
    hipsters peace & junk & drums!
    Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
    the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
    mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
    Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
    middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
    ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
    Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
    Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
    Holy Istanbul!
    Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
    clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
    the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
    Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
    locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
    tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
    abyss!
    Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
    bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
    Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
    kindness of the soul!”
    Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

  • #11
    William Blake
    “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
    William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  • #12
    James Baldwin
    “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
    James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
    tags: home

  • #13
    Tom Waits
    “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
    Tom Waits

  • #14
    Frank Zappa
    “Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.”
    Frank Zappa

  • #15
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.”
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

  • #16
    Yukio Mishima
    “Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.”
    Yukio Mishima

  • #17
    Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    “I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
    The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
    Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
    Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
    The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
    The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
    That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
    That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
    That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
    That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
    That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
    Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

  • #18
    Lao Tzu
    “We join spokes together in a wheel,
    but it is the center hole
    that makes the wagon move.

    We shape clay into a pot,
    but it is the emptiness inside
    that holds whatever we want.

    We hammer wood for a house,
    but it is the inner space
    that makes it livable.

    We work with being,
    but non-being is what we use.”
    Lao Tzu

  • #19
    Mark Twain
    “The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.”
    Mark Twain

  • #20
    Attar of Nishapur
    “The home we seek is in eternity;
    The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
    Of which your paradise is but a drop.
    This ocean can be yours; why should you stop
    Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
    The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
    Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.
    Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems --
    Which matters more, the body or the soul?
    Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole.”
    Attar of Nishapur

  • #21
    Jorge Luis Borges
    “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
    Jorge Luis Borges

  • #22
    Sengcan
    “To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know.”
    Sengstan, Hsin Hsin Ming

  • #23
    Lao Tzu
    “Rushing into action, you fail.
    Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
    Forcing a project to completion,
    you ruin what was almost ripe.

    Therefore the Master takes action
    by letting things take their course.
    He remains as calm at the end
    as at the beginning.
    He has nothing,
    thus has nothing to lose.
    What he desires is non-desire;
    what he learns is to unlearn.
    He simply reminds people
    of who they have always been.
    He cares about nothing but the Tao.
    Thus he can care for all things.”
    Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

  • #24
    René Daumal
    “This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.”
    Rene Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

  • #25
    René Daumal
    “The cock crowing in the milky dawn thinks its call raises the sun; the child howling in a closed room thinks its cries open the door. But the sun and the mother go their own way, following the laws of their beings. Those who see us, even though we cannot see ourselves, opened the door for us, answering our puerile calculations, our unsteady desires, and our awkward efforts with a generous welcome.”
    René Daumal, Mount Analogue

  • #26
    Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
    “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
    and rightdoing there is a field.
    I'll meet you there.

    When the soul lies down in that grass
    the world is too full to talk about.”
    Rumi

  • #27
    Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
    “silence is the language of god,
    all else is poor translation.”
    Rumi

  • #28
    E.E. Cummings
    “may my heart always be open to little
    birds who are the secrets of living
    whatever they sing is better than to know
    and if men should not hear them men are old

    may my mind stroll about hungry
    and fearless and thirsty and supple
    and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
    for whenever men are right they are not young

    and may myself do nothing usefully
    and love yourself so more than truly
    there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
    pulling all the sky over him with one smile”
    E.E. Cummings, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

  • #29
    Fernando Pessoa
    “I am nothing.
    I'll never be anything.
    I couldn't want to be something.
    Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
    Fernando Pessoa

  • #30
    Marcus Aurelius
    “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.”
    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations



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