Yanko Tsvetkov > Yanko's Quotes

“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.”
― Julia Child

“Today`s culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like (Ernest Hemingway). (John Steinbeck) is important due to American guns. Had (John Dos Passos) and (William Faulkner) been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who`d read them?”
― Luis Buñuel

“History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

“Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant.”
― Socrates

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
― Socrates

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”
― Socrates

“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."

[As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment]”
― Socrates

“I am a citizen of the world.”
― Diogenes of Sinope, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

“When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, "And I sentenced them to stay at home.”
― Diogenes

“Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.”
― Joseph Campbell, Mythology and the Individual

“A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in.”
― Frederick The Great

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

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.”
― Susan Faludi

“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?”
― David Byrne, How Music Works

“The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction.”
― Julian Assange

“When you read The Arabian Nights you accept Islam. You accept the fables woven by generations as if they were by one single author or, better still, as if they had no author. And in fact they have one and none. Something so worked on, so polished by generations is no longer associated with and individual. In Kafka's case, it's possible that his fables are now part of human memory. What happened to Quixote could happen to to them. Let's say that all the copies of Quixote, in Spanish and in translation, were lost. The figure of Don Quixote would remain in human memory. I think that the idea of a frightening trial that goes on forever, which is at the core of The Castle and The Trial (both books that Kafka, of course, never wanted to publish because he knew they were unfinished), is now grown infinite, is now part of human memory and can now be rewritten under different titles and feature different circumstances. Kafka's work now forms a part of human memory.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Conversations, Volume 1

“Toda época y toda sociedad recrea sus «otros».”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“It was life, you were stuck with it, and all you could do was live it.”
― Stephen King, Laurie

“We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

“As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Poverty is a tick that feeds on virtue.”
― Giambattista Basile, The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones

“Happiness is mostly bestowed upon people who are deprived of curiosity.”
― Yanko Tsvetkov, Sex, Drugs and Tales of Wonder

“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indetations, scrolls.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities