Quotes by Diplomats - Page 19

(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests.
Eça de Queirós
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Dag Hammarskjöld
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
Czesław Miłosz
You can not live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Palestine is the anvil of our souls.
Clovis Maksoud
On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage.. . ."I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out."So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history.
Carl T. Rowan
Circumstances are the seeds of literature.
Salvador de Madariaga
Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals, and to imagine that together we can do great things.In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.
Caroline Kennedy
With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Eleanor Roosevelt
None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.
Washington Irving
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
James Russell Lowell
There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
Washington Irving
Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
Washington Irving
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Eleanor Roosevelt
To those who in their turn selectively handle Mormon history and discourage our probing it in a number of areas, one needs to say (or at least to ask): Haven’t we been, if anything, overly cautious, overly mistrustful, overly condescending to a membership and a public who are far more perceptive and discerning than we often give them credit for? Haven’t we, in our care not to offend a soul or cause anyone the least misunderstanding, too much deprived such individuals of needful occasions for personal growth and more in-depth life-probing experience? In our neurotic cautiousness, our fear of venturing, haven’t we often settled for an all-too-shallow and confining common denominator that insults the very Intelligence we presume to glorify and is also dishonest because, deep down, we all know better (to the extent that we do)? Isn’t our intervention often too arbitrary, reflecting the hasty, uninformed reaction of only one or a couple of influential objectors? Don’t we in the process too severely and needlessly test the loyalty and respect of and lose credibility with many more than we imagine? Isn’t there a tendency among us, bred by the fear of displeasing, to avoid healthy self-disclosure—public or private—and to pretend about ourselves to ourselves and others? Doesn’t this in turn breed loneliness and make us, more than it should, strangers to each other? And when we are too calculating, too self-conscious, too mistrustful, too prescriptive, and too regimental about our roots and about one another’s aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life, aren’t we self-defeating?
Thomas F. Rogers
Forge your iron; shape it by force, not into a flower you already know but into what can also be a flower if you think it is and it is so.
João Cabral de Melo Neto
I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had diedOne word then, one smile is enoughAnd I'm happy; happy that it's not true
Pablo Neruda
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, and link by link, and step by step; sharpen the knives you kept hidden away, thrust them into my breast, into my hands, like a torrent of sunbursts, an Amazon of buried jaguars, and leave me cry: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries.
Pablo Neruda
yo te amo para comenzar a amarte,para recomenzar el infinitoy para no dejar de amarte nunca:por eso no te amo todavía.
Pablo Neruda
Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
Pablo Neruda
Amé, fuí amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!I loved, I was loved, the sun stroked my face.Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!
Amado Nervo
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...
Czesław Miłosz
For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
Washington Irving
I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.
Czesław Miłosz
Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
Pablo Neruda
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.
Czesław Miłosz
I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.
Pablo Neruda
Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?
Pablo Neruda
De pronto no puedo decirtelo que yo te debo decir,hombre,perdóname; sabrásque aunque no escuches mis palabrasno me eché a llorar ni a dormiry que contigo estoy sin vertedesde hace tiempo y hasta el fin.I can't just suddenly tell youwhat I should be telling you,friend, forgive me; you knowthat although you don't hear my words,I wasn't asleep or in tears,that I am with you without seeing youfor a good long time and until the end.
Pablo Neruda
A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.
Pablo Neruda
Soy el desesperado, la palabra sin ecos, el que lo perdiò todo, y el que todo lo tuvo.
Pablo Neruda
La heradera del dia destruida.(The heiress of the destroyed day.)
Pablo Neruda
Well, now,if little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving you little by little.If suddenlyyou forget medo not look for me,for I shall already have forgotten you.
Pable Neruda
Mineral cactai,quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,the bird that punctures space,thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind.The pines taught me to talk to myself.In that garden I learnedto send myself off.Later there were no gardens.
Octavio Paz
Un soir qu'ils étaient couchés l'un près de l'autre, comme elle lui demandait d'inventer un poème qui commencerait par je connais un beau pays, il s'exécuta sur-le-champ. Je connais un beau pays Il est de l'or et d'églantine Tout le monde s'y sourit Ah quelle aventure fine Les tigres y sont poltrons Les agneaux ont fière mine À tous les vieux vagabonds Ariane donne des tartines. Alors, elle lui baisa le la main, et il eut honte de cette admiration.
Albert Cohen
because two bodies, naked and entwined,leap over time, they are invulnerable,nothing can touch them, they return to the source,there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,no yesterday, no names, the truth of twoin a single body, a single soul,oh total being...
Octavio Paz
No duties. I don’t have to be profound.I don’t have to be artistically perfect.Or sublime. Or edifying.I just wander. I say: ‘You were running,That’s fine. It was the thing to do.’And now the music of the worlds transforms me.My planet enters a different house.Trees and lawns become more distinct.Philosophies one after another go out.Everything is lighter yet not less odd.Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.We talk a little of district fairs,Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.That’s better than examining one’s private dreams.And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell.
Czesław Miłosz
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
John Adams
It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
Czesław Miłosz
I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.
Pablo Neruda
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Pablo Neruda
Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.
Pablo Neruda
So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Pablo Neruda
You shall create beauty not to excite the sensesbut to give sustenance to the soul.
Gabriela Mistral
Our love was bornoutside the walls,in the wind,in the night,in the earth,and that's why the clay and the flower,the mud and the rootsknow your name.
Pablo Neruda
You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.
Rubén Darío
I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.
Pablo Neruda
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Pablo Neruda
This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
Octavio Paz
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.Write, for example,'The night is shatteredand the blue stars shiver in the distance.'The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.Tonight I can write the saddest lines.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.Through nights like this one I held her in my armsI kissed her again and again under the endless sky.She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.How could one not have loved her great still eyes.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 soul like dew to the pasture.What does it matter that my love could not keep her.The night is shattered and she is not with me.This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.My sight searches for her as though to go to her.My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.The same night whitening the same trees.We, of that time, are no longer the same.I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.Because through nights like this one I held her in my armsmy sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.Though this be the last pain that she makes me sufferand these the last verses that I write for her.
Pablo Neruda
I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.....
Pablo Neruda
You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Pablo Neruda
You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.
Czesław Miłosz
Love is a clash of lightnings
Pablo Neruda
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda
Each in the most hidden sack keptthe lost jewels of memory,intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,the fragment of public or private happiness.A few, the wolves, collected thighs,other men loved the dawn scratchingmountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.For me happiness was to share singing,praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:my life had no use on earth.
Pablo Neruda