“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
“When you really want love you will
find it waiting for you.”
“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”
“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”
“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”
“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”
“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
“Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.”
“Art only begins where Imitation ends.”
“I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.”
“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”
“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.”
“To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.”
“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”
“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.”
“sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”
“Nature....she will hang the night stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send word the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
“A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—-the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul—-and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.”
“I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.”
“The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation”
“I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any
rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful
books; and what joy can be greater?”
“What the artist is
always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are
one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in
which form reveals.”
“Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.”
“The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.”
“Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.”
“It was always once springtime in my heart.”
“We're not peculiar."
"Oh, yes, you are. Don't you realize that in my world my parents are peculiar because they'd never been divorced? Basically because it would have been too much trouble. But you live in a world where not only are your parents not divorced, they appear to love each other”
“Feed your fears and your faith will starve. Feed your faith, and your fears will.”
“One presidential advisor to another: "If the world made sense, we'd all have to find honest work.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you very much.” Cole pulled a tomato half out of the salad and stuffed it into his mouth.
“That’s right. I heard you and Ron were good friends,” Booker said innocently, the first clue a joke was coming. Booker was many things, but innocent wasn’t one of them.
Cole studied him for a moment. “Okay, I know I’m going to hate myself for asking, but who is Ron?” Cole leaned against the counter and folded his arms across his chest, looking every bit the 6'3 3/4" that he was.
“You know, Ron, as in Ronald McDonald.”
I groaned. That was bad.
“I can cook,” Cole said indecisively.
“Doc, you’re the only person I know that can burn water!”
“I have never burn–okay, once. Are you ever going to forgive me?”
“You ruined my favorite pan!”
“Pensate al cristallo che, massa amorfa, assume una forma regolare ubbidendo alle proprie immutabili leggi pur senza averne coscienza. Non potrebbe succedere lo stesso nel mondo dello spirito?”
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