Jose > Jose's Quotes

“Triste de quem é feliz !
Vive porque a vida dura.
Nada na alma lhe diz
Mais que a lição da raiz
Ter por vida a sepultura.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Mensagem

“His gaze, blunted
by the unnumbered procession
of iron bars, uncounted
as his softly padded steps.

Smooth motion of blood and sinew
turning in its own, small circle
prescribed by bars and walls
...and skin, confined.

Suddenly, without warning,
a flash of light and image
pierces the caged brain,
and passing through its beating heart
to stillness finds its way. ”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say."

"Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise."

"What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?"

"You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”
― Guy Debord

“Why it's simply impassible!
Alice: Why, don't you mean impossible?
Door: No, I do mean impassible. (chuckles) Nothing's impossible!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. “How interesting,” observed the astronomer, “all Scottish sheep are black!” To which the physicist responded, “No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!” The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, “In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.”
― Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
― Mark Twain

“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.”
― Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?
A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
― Taleb Nassim Nicholas

“Brevity is the soul of command.”
― Xenophon, Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War

“Fame is—has always been—the sister of giants.”
― Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”

The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Alice answered.

“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Stratton was at a loss. Ashbourne seemed disappointed, and continued. “The next step was to artificially induce the growth of an embryo from an ovum, by application of a name.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in this world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people…”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.”

“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”

Then again, that was my name on it.

This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position. (On giving up art to play chess)”
― Marcel Duchamp

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

”
― Marcel Duchamp