Quotes by Writers - Page 79

Awareness of your shortcomings is a strengthening process.
Ehsan Sehgal
Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you’d live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You do see me crossing the meadowstiff and dead from the mist?I long for that home,that home I've never had,and without any hopethat I'll ever be able to reach it.For such a home, never touched,I carry that longing that willnever die, like that meadow diesstiff and dead from the mist.You do see me crossing it, full of dread?
Robert Walser
I've discovered a new video game called owning my home.
Dan Harmon
It was the best night in he had had in a long time, maybe ever. Finally, as he told her goodbye, he knew he had some things to take care of when he got back home. Chicago was home now. As long as she was there, it was his home.
Mia Castile
So if someone is thinking about me, then that's the place I go ?
Masashi Kishimoto
At Christmas, all roads lead home.
Marjorie Holmes
And when I look into his eyes there’s a feeling of something I can only describe as familiarity, a sense of safety. Like coming home.
Rebecca James
Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn't sure. He didn't have anything to compare it to. He hadn't even ever been out of the Delta.
Lewis Nordan
There is no home as comfortable as your father's arms and no bed as soft as your mother's lap.
Faraaz Kazi
Freedom meant one thing to him—home.But they wouldn't let him go home.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is a certain loveliness, I think, to performing deep cleaning in one’s underwear on a beautiful summer day.
Agnostic Zetetic
The world turns gray, the air grows cool, the fog blows in. Only at evening can you really value home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me.
Eula Biss
Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.
Alejandro Zambra
I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.
Eula Biss
What's the good of a home, if you are never in it?
George Grossmith
Nakajima's presence didn't put any pressure on me, either. Quite the opposite: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around.
Banana Yoshimoto
I didn't care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything– it didn't matter. I felt close to him, and I'd come to regard him as just another part of the scenery.
Banana Yoshimoto
Are all societies doomed to amnesia—or are there communities that have preserved their collective cultural memory?The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia. It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.
Galeano Eduardo
My father says you remember the smell of your country no matter where you are but only recognize it when you're far away.
Aglaja Veteranyi
He feels safer just knowing that even if he's away there is a home waiting for him to return.
Gabriel Bá
The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)
Banana Yoshimoto
Early mapmakers kept their backs to the sea
Sarah Hymas
My fist is her flag still furled. Take the cannoli and leave the tuxedo - This is my jackleg opera to the world.
B.J. Ward
The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer.
Agona Apell
Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,and let my obedience align itself with such iron      conditionsthat the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shakethe deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.
Mark Eisner
God’s justice in the one, and his goodness in the other, is exercised for evermore, as the everlasting subjects of his reward and punishment.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbartThe human power is revealed by poetIl potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Eggshells become hard to break after walking on them for so long.
Mia Castile
Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.
Lin Yutang
There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head.
Lin Yutang
Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.
Nicolas Chamfort
Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of die acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. 'Non-attached* is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves.Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these. For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavel's phrase, 'they are not enough, Non-attachment to self and to what are called 'the things of this world' has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.
Aldous Huxley
An opportunity fordoing an injury happens a hundred times a day, hut for doing good not once a year," says Zoroaster.
Voltaire
One person's garbage is another person's commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
If your holy book makes you hate, you're reading the wrong shit, mate.
Fakeer Ishavardas
There is always a choice. Always. So do not say, you had no choice. Good or bad, doing it or not, is about you, not choices. Always.
Fakeer Ishavardas
If your needs are little, you are rich enough.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Have faith in 'What Is'. You will get your due, good or not so good, to your liking or not, but in time, as it is meant to be.
Fakeer Ishavardas
-Truly, freeing oneself in one’s own mind is only the first step on a path of freedom.-
Mark Alberto Yoder Nunez
if not try then catch
Ahmad Moawad
To pretend is to know oneself.
Fernando Pessoa
Every man must find his own philosophy, his attitude towards life.
Lin Yutang
The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.
Alan W. Watts
[T]he greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a chord or note beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.
Alan W. Watts
Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.
Herman Melville
...flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
Herman Melville
My life is my message to the world
Ghandi
...I should always find, the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on one hand, or by hard labor, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtues and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life...
Daniel Defoe
One must not judge other cultures by the standars of one's one,' said Aunt Hilda
Eva Ibbotson
Reality - Dreams = Animal BeingReality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)Dreams - Humor = FanaticismDreams + Humor = FantasyReality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Voltaire
No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It was as if he'd suddenly become intimately aware of the fragility of life and how precious time really was. As a result, he made a conscious effort to simplify his life, with the goal of eliminating unnecessary stress. No longer interested in society's definition of success, he began purging his life of material things. Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be be happy than busy.
Micah Sparks
You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one.
Roger Zelazny
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
Hilary Mantel
No wonder the sky had to be blotted out by advertisements. The stars drowned with lights. If everyone could see beyond Coalition horizons, perhaps they'd see the titans of humanity for what they were: tiny creatures, smaller than insects, and in the scale of things, every bit as insignificant.
S.J. Kincaid
Imagine a wall that's green on one side and red on the other. You stand on one side and only see green. I stand on the other side and only see red. We'll both be right about the color we see, even though we disagree on what color the wall is. Being able to realize that the other person has a valid point, even if you disagree with it, that's maturity.
Oliver Gaspirtz