Charles > Charles's Quotes

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#1

“To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

29 likes

#2

“If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: inspirational

39 likes

#3

“I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

tags: expression, life, self-expression, writing

1 likes

#4

“Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

tags: thinking, thoughts

1 likes

#5

“Man needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

tags: man, nature, spiritualism, spirituality

2 likes

#6

“A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

tags: books, great-books, reading

2 likes

#7

“How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one's life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how communicate?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

tags: communication, sharing-life

2 likes

#8

“He ran his mind over the things they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them so far apart and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking, merely talking?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

tags: communication, connection-to-others, talking

1 likes

#9

“Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there's so much... scratching on the matchbox”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

tags: expression, expression-of-true-feelings, music, writing

4 likes

#10

“That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

tags: coincidence, destiny, fate, life, living

3 likes

#11

“What was it, token of all our wordless and incongruent hunger that one saw here, that has never been expressed, that was so imminent, so exasperating, so impalpably near, as if the opiate of finality we had sought for our exacerbated nerves, the complete nurture we needed to stop the jaws of Cerberus was here almost within our grasp, an inch away from hope, a hand's breadth off from certainty.”
― Thomas Wolfe, The Good Child's River

tags: desire, frustration, longing

1 likes

#12

“For it is so with time and memory: the seed of our deepest feeling is buried under the rush of a momentary and violent one, there is in all feeling a quality of deception and evasion, and the meanings of the spirit become evident only in the light of a dispassionate distance,”
― Thomas Wolfe, The Good Child's River

tags: emotion, memories, memory, recollection, time

1 likes

#13

“The great, the unspeakable crime against life is not that we have lived mistakenly or badly, but that we have lived cautiously and half-heartedly, and without belief.”
― Thomas Wolfe, The Good Child's River

tags: life, life-lessons, living-life-to-the-fullest, passionate-living

2 likes

#14

“And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless house in which lived several Russian lost shades, the whole of life seemed like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

tags: life

3 likes

#15

“...really, what a strange man he is, thought klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

tags: ganin, klara, mary

7 likes

#16

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

147 likes

#17

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

tags: sheltering-sky-bowles-death-life

536 likes

#18

“Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

tags: life, names, words

1 likes

#19

“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

tags: individuality, respect, uniqueness

1304 likes

#20

“Only the life within hm was real, the anguished beating of his heart, the nostalgic sting of longing, the joys and fears of his dreams. To them he belonged; to them he abandoned himself. Suddenly, in the middle of a page or a lesson, surrounded by his classmates, he'd sink into himself and forget everything, listening only to the rivers and voices inside himself which drew him away, into deep wells filled with dark melodies, into colorful abysses full of fairy-tale deeds, and all the sounds were like his mother's voice, and the thousands of eyes all were his mother's eyes.”
― Herman Hesse

tags: dreams, heart, mother, nostalgia, revery

0 likes

#21

“One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old... and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

tags: life, meaning

4 likes

#22

“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

tags: knowledge, literature, philosophy, understanding

135 likes

#23

“To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible?”
― Herman Hesse

tags: creation, living

0 likes

#24

“And he had to say farewell to his hands, his eyes, to hunger and thirst, to love, to playing the lute, to sleeping and waking, to everything. Tomorrow a bird would fly through the air and Goldmund would no longer see it, a girl would sing in a window and he would not hear her song, the river would run and the dark fish would swim silently, the wind would blow and sweep the yellow leaves on the ground, the sun would shine and stars would blink in the sky, young men would go dancing, the first snow would lie on the distant mountains—everything would go on, trees would cast their shadows, people would look gay or sad out of their living eyes, dogs would bark, cows would low in the barns of villages, and all of it without Goldmund.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

tags: death, living, regret

2 likes

#25

“The philosopher has a duty,... in reading scientific texts, to combine semantic tolerance with semantic criticism—to accept in practice what he denounces as a matter of principle, namely, the confusions that result from illegitimately converting correlations into identifications.”
― Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain

tags: criticism, fallacy, neuroscience, philosophy, science, semantics

0 likes

#26

“We can love only what cannot be fully recognized, what cannot yield its mysteries to thought”
― James P. Carse, Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience

tags: love, mystery, thought

0 likes

#27

“To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life”
― Sherwood Anderson, Death in the Woods and Other Stories

tags: civility, hope, illusion, life

1 likes

#28

“You can't always be too fussy about what you say to a young boy. Really, sometimes, you should take him into your confidence, into your life, make him a part of your life.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Death in the Woods and Other Stories

tags: fatherhood, life, son, vulnerability

1 likes

#29

“Wherever in this sublunary world philosophy is absent, there reigns somnambulism”
― José Ortega y Gasset, Concord and Liberty

tags: philosophy

0 likes

#30

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

tags: friendship, friendship-quotes

1 likes

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