Britt > Britt's Quotes

“Feet, what do I need them for
If I have wings to fly.”
― Frida Kahlo

“Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.”
― Murakami, Haruki

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Everyone smiles in the same language.”
― George Carlin

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
― Hermann Hesse , Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Zal je? Zonder dat ze uitgesproken wordt, is deze vraag er altijd
Omdat we weten dat het leven ongenadig is, van nature gierig.
Zo makkelijk is het te vernielen. Het is zo verleidelijk
Iets dood te laten bloeden, alleen maar omdat het er is;

Meer hebben we blijkbaar niet nodig, dat onderscheidt
Ons van de dieren. Maar soms, 's zomers liggen we te wijzen
Naar de sterren, naar iets wat even onbegrijpelijk is als tijd,
Als de onmogelijkheid zelf van de sterren, of als het simpele feit

Dat jij en ik op die bepaalde dag toevallig dezelfde richting uitkeken.
Dat niemand onze hoofden leidden, zoals niemand onze armen nu omhoog-
Duwt. Maar het is niet naar de sterren dat we wijzen, het is niet de val

Die we voelen, hoewel van angst verstrengelen onder de denken.
Ondanks het besef dat we voorlopig worden gedoogd
Door de dingen zelf, antwoordt jouw lichaam al voor mij. Ja, ik zal.”
― Peter Verhelst, Nieuwe sterrenbeelden

“Wie een berg sloopt bouwt een nieuwe berg
want niets gaat verloren, alles helpt
vet om kaarsen te maken, baleinen
om eelt weg te snijden, melk
om lippen te laten glanzen, beenderen
om je je haren te zien kammen
een pels om je op neer te leggen
zodat de sterrenhemel eindelijk kan ontstaan
zolang je er niet bent is er hoop
ik wou dat je voor me kwam staan
tussen mij en de zon
om de zon door je heen te zien stralen
om de vlekken onder mijn oogleden te zien
wegdrijven en daarna niets meer te zien
kom me halen
liefste
withete zon van me.”
― Peter Verhelst, Nieuwe sterrenbeelden

“Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.”
― Robert Frost

“Boeken zijn spiegels: je ziet slechts dat wat je zelf al in je draagt.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire that owed their inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them. Profound Albertine, whom I at once saw sleeping, and who was dead.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“Gij met uw angsten altijd. Gij met uw emoties!”
― Leo Pleysier, Wit is altijd schoon

“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
― Helen Keller

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
― Hermann Hesse

“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Your eyes in which I travel
Have given to signs along the roads
A meaning alien to the earth.”
― Paul Eluard

“There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!”
― Hermann Hesse

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being