David > David's Quotes

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”
― carson mccullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill, and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”
― Muhammad Ali

“Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.”
― Mo Yan

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“What he then saw was like an apparition. She was seated in the middle of a bench all alone, or, at any rate, he could see no one, dazzled as he was by her eyes.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education Vol 1

“plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But,”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such Olympian speed.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“To read with diligence; not to rest satisfied with a light and superficial knowledge, nor quickly to assent to things commonly spoken of: whom”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The ides of March are come.
Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar; but not gone.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Man is not naturally a ferocious wild beast. On the contrary, he loves, ordinarily, to live in peace and quietness, to till his lands and tend his flocks, and to enjoy the blessings of peace and repose. It is comparatively but a small number in any age of the world, and in any nation, whose passions of ambition, hatred, or revenge become so strong as that they love bloodshed and war. But these few, when they once get weapons into their hands, trample recklessly and mercilessly upon the rest.”
― Jacob Abbott, History of Julius Caesar

“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“I'm lonely," she said. She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Where, you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

“The Son of Man goes forth to war, A golden crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar— Who follows in his train?” I”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King