Quotes by Diplomats - Page 14

Lo, which a greet thing is affeccioun!Men may die of imaginacioun,So depe may impressioun be take.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.
Washington Irving
Die slowlyHe who becomes the slave of habit,who follows the same routes every day,who never changes pace,who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,who does not speak and does not experience,dies slowly.He or she who shuns passion,who prefers black on white,dotting ones "it’s" rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,that turn a yawn into a smile,that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,dies slowly.He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,who is unhappy at work,who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,to thus follow a dream,those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,die slowly.He who does not travel, who does not read,who does not listen to music,who does not find grace in himself,she who does not find grace in herself,dies slowly.He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,who does not allow himself to be helped,who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,dies slowly.He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, he or she who don't reply when they are asked something they do know,die slowly.Let's try and avoid death in small doses,reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.Only a burning patience will leadto the attainment of a splendid happiness.
Pablo Neruda
Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
Pablo Neruda
I remember you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.
Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.To hear the immense night, still more immense without her,And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.
Pablo Neruda
If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless.
Kofi Annan
I demolish my bridges behind me...then there is no choice but to move forward
Fridtjof Nansen
If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on.I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die.I shall live on.For where a man has no voice,there, my voice.Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them.When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind.No, forgive me.If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.
Pablo Neruda
We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls. A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience; but it is now an illness that can be cured.Death however, remains incurable. Though we might be embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact of death tells us so much about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures. Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act.
Charles Le Gai Eaton
I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed eyes
Pablo Neruda
LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreLI want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
Pablo Neruda
Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who 'forgives' you--out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.The price you must pay for your own liberation through another's sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.
Baldassarre Castiglione
You are not the oil, you are not the air—merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency—your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.
Dag Hammarskjöld
I love you like the plant that does not bloomand carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,
Pablo Neruda
Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadowswhere you accompany me in your dreamsand tell me the hour of light.
Pablo Neruda
I know you exist not just because your eyes flyand give light to things like an open window
Pablo Neruda
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?What primal night does Man touch with his senses?Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:Love is a war of lightning,and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,and a genital fire, transformed by delight,slips through the narrow channels of bloodto precipitate a nocturnal carnation,to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.
Pablo Neruda
So long as we learn it doesn’t matter who teaches us, does it?
E.R. Braithwaite
A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.
Andrew Dickson White
They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my armsAnd my roots will set off to seek another land
Pablo Neruda
we know little of the things for which we pray
Geoffrey Chaucer
How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years.
Shashi Tharoor
Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.
Shashi Tharoor
Do you not hear the constant victory,in the human footraceof time, slow as fire,sure, and thick and Herculeanaccumulating its volume and adding its sad fiber?
Pablo Neruda
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
I want to see the thirstinside the syllablesI want to touch the firein the sound:I want to feel the darknessof the cry. I wantwords as roughas virgin rocks.” - Verb.
Pablo Neruda
In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance.
Washington Irving
Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.
Romain Gary
Our belief ultimately determines our faith.
Kenneth Newry
The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light.
Pablo Neruda
In creating the only hard thing's to begin
James Russell Lowell
More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that is why we have the United Nations.
Kofi Annan
The art of statemanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which unlives us and makes us strangers,that invents our face and wears it away
Octavio Paz
better the crime,the suicides of lovers, the incest committedby brother and sister like two mirrorsin love with their likeness, better to eatthe poisoned bread, adultery on a bedof ashes, ferocious love, the poisonousvines of delirium, the sodomite who wearsa gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,better to be stoned in the plaza than to turnthe mill that squeezes out the juice of life,that turns eternity into empty hours,minutes into prisons, and time intocopper coins and abstract shit
Octavio Paz
...Who knows what death, anxiety of the living, Who knows what loneliness, end of the lovingI could say to myself of the love (I had): Let it not be immortal, since it is flame But let it be infinite while it lasts.
Vinicius de Moraes
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
Czesław Miłosz
Almighty Freedom! give my venturous songThe force, the charm that to thy voice belong;Tis thine to shape my course, to light my way,To nerve my country with the patriot lay,To teach all men where all their interest lies,How rulers may be just and nations wise:Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee.
Joel Barlow
It has often given my pleasure to observe, that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters form a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind them together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation of their various ties. With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give us this one connected country to one united people -a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by they their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
John Jay
...My deepest personal reason for staying in Paris is that whatever I have as a character, good or bad, is based on the fact that since the age of four I have never run away from anything however painful or dangerous when I thought it was my duty to take a stand -- the American Ambassador to France upon being asked to evacuate Paris by the State Department on the eve of Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940
William C. Bullitt
People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis.
Jean Monnet
Here then is an infallible criterion, by which the nation may judge of the intentions of those who govern it ... if they corrupt the morals of the people, spread a taste for luxury, effeminacy, a rage for licentious pleasures, - if they stimulate the higher orders to a ruinous pomp and extravagance, - beware, citizens! beware of those corruptors! they only aim at purchasing slaves in order to exercise over them an arbitrary sway.
Emer de Vattel
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings
Octavio Paz
Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be the justification for its existence-- the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast scale; and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems which men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly find time to notice.
Charles Le Gai Eaton
So many ruins bear witness to good intentions which went astray, good intentions unenlightened by any glimmer of wisdom. To bring religion to the people is a fine and necessary undertaking, but this is not a situation in which the proposed end can be said to justify the means. The further people have drifted from the truth, the greater is the temptation to water down the truth, glossing over its less palatable aspects and, in short, allowing a policy of compromise to become one of adulteration. In this way it is hoped that the common man – if he can be found – will be encouraged to find a small corner in his busy life for religion without having to change his ways or to grapple with disturbing thoughts. It is a forlorn hope. Standing, as it were, at the pavement’s edge with his tray of goods, the priest reduces the price until he is offering his wares for nothing: divine judgement is a myth, hell a wicked superstition, prayer less important than decent behaviour, and God himself dispensable in the last resort; and still the passers-by go their way, sorry over having to ignore such a nice man but with more important matters demanding their attention. And yet these matters with which they are most urgently concerned are, for so many of them, quicksands in which they feel themselves trapped. Had they been offered a real alternative, a rock firm-planted from the beginning of time, they might have been prepared to pay a high price.
Charles Le Gai Eaton
Tax is not a four-letter word; rather, it's the price we pay for the country we want.
Alex Himelfarb
A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Politeness, delicacy [and] decency ... are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
John Adams
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)
Andrew Young
What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I’m in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.
Shashi Tharoor
Our mothers are our first teachers, and we teach others the same lessons we learn from them. As a child, when your mother believes in you, you believe in yourself, and when that happens, there is nothing you can’t do. As a mother, that is the greatest gift we can give to a child.
Caroline Kennedy
Oh God, forgive me for the hateful thoughts, because I love them, these brutal, disarming bastards, I love them …
E.R. Braithwaite
Como se reparten el sol en el naranjo las naranjas?How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree?
Pablo Neruda
You've got to S-M-I-L-ETo be H-A-Double-P-Y
Shirley Temple Black