n y m p h > n y m p h's Quotes

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days

“Pages full of idle words Penned with hot and bitter tears: All men call the author fool; None his secret message hears. The origin of The Story of the Stone has now been made clear.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Golden Days

“There seems to be plenty of it,' was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
― William Saroyan, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories

“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
― Claude Monet

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Often, we melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams, as though we were sinking into syrupy bowls of gooseberries, of raspberries, of bilberries.”
― Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.”
― Annie Dillard, The Abundance

“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Oh, with you, I could conquer the world - oh, with you I could catch hold of the moon like a little silver sixpence.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Journal of Katherine Mansfield

“Do you feel in this letter my love for you today - It is as warm as a bird's nest.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Journal of Katherine Mansfield

“Where do we find happiness? We pursue it, search for it, kill ourselves trying to find it, and all the time it's just here...It comes just when we've stopped expecting anything, stopped hoping, stopped being afraid.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Dimanche and Other Stories

“How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!”
― Irène Némirovsky, Dimanche and Other Stories

“Did the great Creator first draw her in a masterpiece,   (9) And then touch life into his art? Or did he make her in his mind alone, Drawing on beauty’s every part? No—considering her singular perfection And her maker’s true omnipotence, I suppose her some quite unique creation In femininity’s treasure house.”
― Kālidāsa, The Recognition of Sakuntala

“May lily-dotted lakes delight your eye; May shade-trees bid the heat of noonday cease; May soft winds blow the lotus-pollen nigh; May all your path be pleasantness and peace.”
― Kālidāsa, The Recognition of Sakuntala

“The cunning waste their pains;
The wise men vex their brains;
But the simpleton, who seeks no gains,
With belly full, he wanders free
As drifting boat upon the sea.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days

“This charming custom of ‘speeding the fairies’ is a special favourite with the fair sex, and in Prospect Garden all the girls were up betimes on this day making little coaches and palanquins out of willow-twigs and flowers and little banners and pennants from scraps of brocade and any other pretty material they could find, which they fastened with threads of coloured silk to the tops of flowering trees and shrubs. Soon every plant and tree was decorated and the whole garden had become a shimmering sea of nodding blossoms and fluttering coloured streamers. Moving about in the midst of it all, the girls in their brilliant summer dresses, beside which the most vivid hues of plant and plumage became faint with envy, added the final touch of brightness to a scene of indescribable gaiety and colour.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Crab-Flower Club

“gleaming like some fairy princess with sparkling jewels and gay embroideries. Her chignon was enclosed in a circlet of gold filigree and clustered pearls. It was fastened with a pin embellished with flying phoenixes, from whose beaks pearls were suspended on tiny chains. Her necklet was of red gold in the form of a coiling dragon. Her dress had a fitted bodice and was made of dark red silk damask with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in raised gold thread. Her jacket was lined with ermine. It was of a slate-blue stuff with woven insets in coloured silks. Her under-skirt was of a turquoise-coloured imported silk crêpe embroidered with flowers.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Golden Days