Lia > Lia's Quotes

“Alas! for poor Erin that some are still seen,
Who would dye the grass red from their hatred to green;
Yet, oh! when you're up, and they're down, let them live,
Then yield them that mercy which they would not give.
Arm of Erin, be strong! but be gentle as brave;
And uplifted to strike, be still ready to save;
Let no feeling of vengeance presume to defile
The cause of, or men of, the Emerald Isle.”
― William Drennan, Selected writings

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”
― John Lame Deer, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”
― R. Buckminister Fuller

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”
― Ashleigh Brilliant

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
― Rumi

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.”
― Denis Waitley

“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb

“Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.

The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Aeneas' mother is a star?"

"No; a goddess."

I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."

He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."

It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Without war there are no heroes."

"What harm would that be?"

"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“In war everybody is a prisoner.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.”
― E.B. White

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi