Quotes by Translators - Page 22

Chakravyuh mein ghusne se pehle,Before entering the circle of deceit,kaun tha mein aur kaisa tha,twho I was, and what I was,yeh mujhe yaad hi na rahega.tI would not remember.Chakravyuh mein ghusne ke baad,tAfter entering the circle of deceit,mere aur chakravyuh ke beech,t(there was) between me and the circle,sirf ek jaanleva nikat’ta thi,tonly a deathly intimacyiska mujhe pata hi na chalega.tthat I never realised.
Dilip Chitre
Never allow others to create your world because if you do, they will always make it too small.
Christopher Robinson
Seeing your own smallness is called insightHonoring your own tenderness is called strength
Jonathan Star
To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
Fernando Pessoa
Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.
John Crowley
Fools, their wisdom weak,are their own enemiesas they go through life,doing evilthat bearsbitter fruit.
Juan Mascaró
La rutina no está tanto en las cosas como en nuestra incapacidad para crear a cada momento un vínculo original con ellas, en nuestra tendencia a leerlas por la falsilla de lo rutinario, de lo ya aprendido. Hay que seguir dejando siempre abierta la puerta al cuarto de jugar.
Carmen Martín Gaite
Ever since that troublemaker Eve handed that gullible Adam the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they say, human beings have been continuously messing up and suffering the consequences. But in the depths of your darkest despair your Beloved calls to you: "Look," he says, and opens the fathomless beautiful wound of his heart so that you can peer inside. All creation is nestled there, bathed in beauty. "Do you see any sin here?" he asks. "Do you detect a shred of retribution?" You do not. All you perceive, from horizon to endless horizon, is love.
Mirabai Starr
Your God would never punish you for being a human being: this life itself is your penance...But it is also more than that: it is a crucible for transformation. Each trial, every loss, is an opportunity for you to meet suffering with love and make of it an offering, a prayer. The minute you lift your pain like a candle the darkness vanishes, and mercy comes rushing in to heal you.
Mirabai Starr
Only God would adore his own death.
Floriano Martins
What I learned in Rwanda was that God is not absent when great evil is unleashed. Whether that evil is man-made or helped along by darker forces, God is right there, saving those who respond to His urgings and trying to heal the rest.
James Riordan
LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.
Anne Carson
Whatever thought grips the mind at the time of death is the one which will propel it and decide for it the nature of its future birth. Thus if one wants to attain god after death, one has to think of him steadfastly... This is not as simple as it sounds, for at the time of death the mind automatically flies to the thought of an object (i.e. money, love) which has possessed it during its sojourn in the world. Thus one must think of god constantly.
Stephen Mitchell
With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far--I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead, theywrote, theylied our neighinginto one of theirimage-ridden languages.
Paul Celan
At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.
Indra Sinha
God is a book I can no longer read.
Floriano Martins
Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
Czesław Miłosz
Abide not with dualism,Carefully avoid pursuing it;As soon as you have right and wrong,Confusion ensues, and Mind is lost. (172)
Edward Conze
Try not to seek after the trueOnly cease to cherish opinions. (172)
Edward Conze
See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Speak you too,speak as the last,say out your say.Speak-But don’t split off No from Yes.Give your say this meaning too:Give it the shadow.Give it shadow enough,Give it as muchAs you know is spread round you fromMidnight to midday and midnight.Look around:See how things all come alive-By death! Alive!Speaks true who speaks shadow.But now the place shrinks, where you stand:Where now, shadow-stripped, where?Climb. Grope upwards.Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!Finer: a threadThe star wants to descend on:So as to swim down beliow, down hereWhere it sees itself shimmer:in the swellOf wandering words.
Paul Celan
Prawda jest córą czasu poczętą w przypadkowym i krótkotrwałym romansie ze zbiegiem okoliczności.
Andrzej Sapkowski
Humor is the whole truth.
Frigyes Karinthy
Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi, but there is a hierarchy of deceptions.Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community.
Walter Kaufmann
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)
Dorothy L. Sayers
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.
Dorothy L. Sayers
If I don't eat junk, I don't gain weight.
Paulina Christensen
If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.
Fernando Pessoa
In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.
Czesław Miłosz
Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
Dorothy L. Sayers
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas de Quincey
Before man ventures into daydreams about his futuristic society, he shouldfirst immerse himself in the nothingness of his being, and finally restore life to what it is all about: a working hypothesis.
Tomislav Sunić
The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.
Marsilio Ficino
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.
Fernando Pessoa
Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
Fernando Pessoa
A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.
Charles Simic
THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags]Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Anne Carson
Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.
Marsilio Ficino
The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.
Lin Yutang
Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.
Lin Yutang
The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
Fernando Pessoa
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
John Anster
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortázar
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
Fernando Pessoa
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live
Lin Yutang
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
Fernando Pessoa
People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.
Andrzej Sapkowski
LearningTo believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
Czesław Miłosz
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
Fernando Pessoa
Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.
Julio Cortázar
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Fernando Pessoa
Valentine WeatherKiss me with rain on your eyelashes,come on, let us sway together,under the trees, and to hell with thunder.
Edwin Morgan
Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.
Julio Cortázar