Hens Cambier > Hens's Quotes

“Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life...”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
― Pablo Picasso

“It takes a very long time to become young.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Love is the greatest refreshment in life”
― Pablo Picasso

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
― Victor Hugo

“We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant
about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who
we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With
justice it's been said that "Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." Our
treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our
knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In
our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something
home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"—which
of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've
been "missing the point."
Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've
been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear
the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at
once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock strike?"—so we rub
ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed "What
have we really just experienced? And more: "Who are we really?" Then, as I've
mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of
our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So
we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we
have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is
furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not
"knowledgeable people.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
― Simone Weil

“They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes, that is it--they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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