herb > herb's Quotes

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”
― Stendhal, Five Short Novels of Stendhal

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.”
― Fabrizio De André

“To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.”
― Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
― Wittgenstein Ludwig

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”
― José Saramago, The Double

“Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.”
― Jose Saramago

“...either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality....A few hundred years hence, in this same place another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.”
― Claude Lévi-Strauss

“There must be repressed truth even in lies.”
― Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun: and Other Plays

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it”
― Vaclav Havel

“You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
― Vaclav Havel

“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”
― Václav Havel

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.”
― Václav Havel

“True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?”
― Václav Havel

“The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.”
― Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala

“I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.”
― Brendan Behan

“An author's first duty is to let down his country.”
― Brendan Behan

“Reading isn't an occupation we encourage among police officers. We try to keep the paperwork down to a minimum.”
― Joe Orton, Loot

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never
enjoy the world.”
― Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
― Confucius

“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.”
― Confucius

“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”
― Confucius

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
― Confucius

“To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.”
― Confucius

“Silence is a true friend who never betrays.”
― Confucius

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.”
― Ananda Coomaraswamy

“Becoming is not a contradiction of being but the epiphany of being.”
― Ananda Coomaraswamy

“From one point of view becoming is a humiliation, and from another a royal procession.”
― Ananda Coomaraswamy