HCL > HCL's Quotes

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,
Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.”
― Philip James Bailey, Festus: A Poem

“He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I’ve remained a virgin for you.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself. ”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.”
― Arrigo Boito

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2

“I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.”
― William Shakespeare

“Expectation is the root of all heartache.”
― William Shakespeare

“Go wisely and slowly. Those who rush stumble and fall.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?...

'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do:
Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I:
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou.”
― William Shakespeare

“O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstory

“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."

- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin

“Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say...”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Everything depends on upbringing. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”
― Leo Tolstoy