Id > Id's Quotes

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue...Live the questions.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I want to unfold.
I don’t want to be folded anywhere,
because where I am folded,
there I am a lie.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I, who even as a child had been so distrustful of music (not because it took me out of myself more powerfully than anything else, but because I had noticed that it did not put me back where it had found me, but left me deeper down, somewhere in the heart of things unfinished)...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend onesel”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let me put aside every desire, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being. This advance will (at first much against the will of the out-stripped men) change the love-experience, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (that will fulfil itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other." Letters to a Young Poet (1904)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The aim of marriage, as I feel it, is not by means of demolition and overthrowing of all boundaries to create a hasty communion, the good marriage is rather one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude and shews him this greatest trust that he has to confer. A togetherness of two human beings is an impossibility and, where it does seem to exist, a limitation, a mutual compromise which robs one side or both sides of their fullest freedom and development. “But granted the consciousness that even between the closest people there persist infinite distances, a wonderful living side by side can arise for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing one another in whole shape and before a great sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Surprising yourself is a big thing for me—to go somewhere that I don’t even know I’m going.”
― Lily Tuck

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“And all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“We can't hold hands―
Someone might see.
Won't you please
Hold toes with me?”
― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

“He wasted his wishes on wishing.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Whatever you are is all okay.
I don't like you anyway.”
― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

“It's amazing the difference
A bit of sky can make.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“There are no happy endings, endings are sad-so let's have a happy beginning and a happy middle.”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

“When I am gone what will you do?
Who will write and draw for you?
Someone smarter-someone new?
Someone better-maybe YOU!”
― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

“I believe that if you don’t want to do anything, then sit there and don’t do it, but don’t expect people to hand you a corn beef sandwich and wash your socks for you.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Liberties aren't given, they are taken.”
― Aldous Huxley