Quotes by Diplomats - Page 20

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,absorbing and thinking, eating each day.
Pablo Neruda
Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
Octavio Paz
The purpose of poetry is to remind ushow difficult it is to remain just one person,for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
Czesław Miłosz
I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.
Pablo Neruda
Green was the silence, wet was the light,the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda
The days aren't discarded or collected, they are beesthat burned with sweetness or maddenedthe sting: the struggle continues,the journeys go and come between honey and pain.No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,or action, or silence, or honor:life is like a stone, a single motion,a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metalthat climbs or descends burning in your bones.
Pablo Neruda
I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.
Pablo Neruda
It was at that agethat poetry came in search of me.
Pablo Neruda
We the mortals touch the metals,the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,knowing they will go on, inert or burning,and I was discovering, naming all the these things:it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
Pablo Neruda
Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?
Daniele Varè
The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovable. Nonetheless, we all arrive at conclusions and cleave to our certainties: that there is nothing but the Void; or that we will find ourselves writing an admissions exam at the Pearly Gates.
Bill Richardson
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.
Washington Irving
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
Joseph de Maistre
To look upon its grass grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.
Washington Irving
No, my dog used to gaze at me,paying me the attention I need,the attention requiredto make a vain person like me understandthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,he’d keep on gazing at mewith a look that reserved for me aloneall his sweet and shaggy life,always near me, never troubling me,and asking nothing.
Pablo Neruda
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
Pablo Neruda
Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.
Pablo Neruda
Donde termina el arco iris,en tu alma o en el horizonte?Where does the rainbow end,in your soul or on the horizon?
Pablo Neruda
Y por que el sol es tan mal amigodel caminante en el desierto?Y por que el sol es tan simpaticoen el jardin del hospital?And why is the sun such a bad companionto the traveler in the desert?And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?
Pablo Neruda
We must always remember that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts. That where there is no vision, people perish. That hope and faith count, and that without charity there can be nothing good. That by daring to live dangerously, we are learning to live generously. And that by believing in the inherent goodness of man, we may ... 'stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.
John Gilbert Winant
Sorry Johnny." "Sorry for what " "For shouting at you. It's just that when I think about the future I keep panicking. It's like falling from the top of the stairs in the dark not knowing where I'll end up." He put his arm around my shoulders. "I understand. Life is precarious for most of us but more so for you. What you forget is what most of your friends see in you." "What's that " "The ability to beat the odds..." "And fall on my feet " He nodded. "I just hope that lasts." "It will Catkin it will. It wouldn't dare fail you.
Julia Golding
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
Pablo Neruda
Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!
Pablo Neruda
Such were our minor preparations for the journey, but above all we laid in an ample stock of good-humour, and a genuine disposition to be pleased; determining to travel in true contrabandista style; taking things as we found them, rough or smooth, and mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond companionship. It is the true way to travel in Spain.
Washington Irving
Nijedna tuđa sreća nije bez pomalo sreće i za nas druge. Zato je jedna velika mudrost od tuđe sreće praviti sreću i za sebe.
Jovan Dučić
To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness
Robert Muller
A man must...not be content to do things well, but must also aim to do them gracefully.
Giovanni della Casa
...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It is of the greatest important in this world that a man should know himself, and the measure of his own strength and means; and he who knows that he has not a genius for fighting must learn how to govern by the arts of peace.
Niccolò Machiavelli
...ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves.
Washington Irving
Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.
Washington Irving
It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.
Otto von Bismarck
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.
John Lothrop Motley
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good, but never assume to comprehend.
John Adams
When we lift our hands in praise and worship, we break spiritual jars of perfume over Jesus. The fragrance of our praise fills the whole earth and touches the heart of God.
Dennis Ignatius
Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
Czesław Miłosz
History is a better guide than good intentions.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is.
Raoul Wallenberg
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
George F. Kennan
In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.
Czesław Miłosz
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
Richard Holbrooke
I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.
Joseph de Maistre
War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.
Joseph de Maistre
Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.
Joseph de Maistre
Every country has the government it deserves.
Joseph de Maistre
A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.
Shashi Tharoor
A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.
Joseph de Maistre
Is it better to be loved or feared?
Niccolò Machiavelli
A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
Niccolò Machiavelli
A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger
Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.Do not take away the rose,the lance flower that you pluck,the water that suddenlybursts forth in joy,the sudden waveof silver born in you.My struggle is harsh and I come backwith eyes tiredat times from having seenthe unchanging earth,but when your laughter entersit rises to the sky seeking meand it opens for me allthe doors of life.My love, in the darkesthour your laughteropens, and if suddenlyyou see my blood stainingthe stones of the street,laugh, because your laughterwill be for my handslike a fresh sword.Next to the sea in the autumn,your laughter must raiseits foamy cascade,and in the spring, love,I want your laughter likethe flower I was waiting for,the blue flower, the roseof my echoing country.Laugh at the night,at the day, at the moon,laugh at the twistedstreets of the island,laugh at this clumsyfool who loves you,but when I openmy eyes and close them,when my steps go,when my steps return,deny me bread, air,light, spring,but never your laughter.
Pablo Neruda
Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
Eleanor Roosevelt