Quotes by Diplomats - Page 15

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,you look like a world, lying in surrender.My rough peasant's body digs in youand makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion.To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flowsand weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
Pablo Neruda
Men in general are as much affected by what a thing appears to be as by what it is, indeed they are frequently influenced more by appearances than by reality.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.
Czesław Miłosz
Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.
Shashi Tharoor
An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.
Romain Gary
The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Doffing the ego'ssafe glory, he findshis naked reality.
Dag Hammarskjöld
I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair
Pablo Neruda
I touched you and my life stopped
Pablo Neruda
Oh invade me with your scalding mouth,search me if you like, with your nocturnal eyes,but allow me to sail and sleep upon your name.
Pablo Neruda
Love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes.
Pablo Neruda
I love the piece of earth you are,because in all the planetary prairiesI do not have another star. You repeatthe multiplication of the universe.
Pablo Neruda
beyond the earth and the shadowthe brightness of our love will stay alive
Pablo Neruda
I repeated: come with me, as if I were dying,and no one saw in my mouth the moon that was bleeding,no one saw the blood that was rising into the silence.Oh love, now let us forget the star with thorns!
Pablo Neruda
Of so much moon were your hips to me,of all the sun your deep mouth and its delight,of so much burning light like honey in the shade
Pablo Neruda
I love you without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,I love you directly without problems or pride:I love you this way because I know no other way to love,
Pablo Neruda
I cannot quit your love without dying.
Pablo Neruda
I love you in order to begin loving you,to start infinity againand never to stop loving you:that is why I do not love you yet.
Pablo Neruda
Dark is the world’s night without you my love,
Pablo Neruda
When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
John Adams
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams
With her courage and determination, Malala has shown what terrorists fear most: a girl with a book.
Ban Ki-Moon
The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that, you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.
Eleanor Roosevelt
With kisses your mouth taught memy lips came to know fire.
Pablo Neruda
Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrowsloosens into the night the petals that form your formlet your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladderrung by rung taking off with me in my dream.I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows.Dark is the world’s night without you my love,
Pablo Neruda
you, my friend, could be the smoke’s daughter,you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage,lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth,your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest,your fingers there in the flames, your compact bodyrose from leaves of fire that make me recallthere were bakers in your family tree,you’re still the rainforest’s bread, ash from violent wheat,
Pablo Neruda
The bright side of the planet moves toward darknessAnd the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,And for me, now as then, it is too much.There is too much world.
Czesław Miłosz
Power is nothing unless you can turn it into influence.
Condoleezza Rice
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best
Otto von Bismarck
Read Hearn, the most eloquent and truthful interpreter of the Japanese mind, and you see the working of that mind to be an example of the working of Bushido.
Inazo Nitobe
To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.
Dag Hammarskjöld
When I was younger, I thought my task was to forge ahead and succeed as an individual. But growing older has helped me realize that our success lies in our relationships— with the family we are born into, the friends we make, the people we fall in love with, and the children we have. Sometimes we struggle, sometimes we adapt, and at other times we set a course for others to follow. We are all leaders and followers in our lives. We are constantly learning from and teaching one another. We learn, too, that the most important work is not done by those who seem the most important, but by those who care the most.
Caroline Kennedy
He was the oldest. When we left Kentucky, our folks told him to look after me. Didn't say a word to me. Wouldn't have occurred to them.
Micheal Punke
The Fourth Crown Princess of the blue Cresent Islands had sixteen rituals to observe from the moment of waking to when she broke her fast.
Julia Golding
And the heart sounds like a sour conch,calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,scattered in the unlucky and disheveled waves:the sea reports sonorouslyon its languid shadows, its green poppies.
Pablo Neruda
No one will retrieve my lost heartamidst so many roots, in the bitter freshnessof the sun multiplied by the fury of the water,there the shadow lives that does not travel with me.
Pablo Neruda
The heart, I think, which is the home of all things rhythmic, is where learned poems go to live.
Bill Richardson
Falling in love is a series of moments in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Those moments are not continuous, but the sense of union with another person is just about the best thing there is.
Caroline Kennedy
people have managed to marry without arithmetic
Geoffrey Chaucer
you will not be master of my body & my property
Geoffrey Chaucer
Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage — about what we’d do, where we’d do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she’d become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She’s a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn’t all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things — frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn’t even seem to miss it. I did.
Shashi Tharoor
Love brought its tail of pains,its long static beam of thorns,and we close our eyes so that nothing,so that no wound will separate us.
Pablo Neruda
from that terrible love the soft pure handsgave peace to my eyes and sun to my senses.
Pablo Neruda
Peace is a precious and a desirable thing. Our generation, bloodied in wars, certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations and countries that is without price. That thing is honor.
Józef Beck
Peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict, but rather finding yourself in the midst of that chaos and remaining calm in your heart.
John Mroz
The world is over-armed and peace is underfunded.
Ban Ki-Moon
Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba,you have vines and stars in your hair,
Pablo Neruda
To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people
Niccolò Machiavelli
I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.
Czesław Miłosz
Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.
Dag Hammarskjöld
A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is the enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current....
Miguel Serrano
When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Come see the cherry trees of a water constellationand the round key of the rapid universe,come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,come before its petals are consumed.
Pablo Neruda
He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.
Dag Hammarskjöld
The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.
Dag Hammarskjöld
With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?
Pablo Neruda