Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, cry 'Caesar!".
Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.
Soothsayer: Beware the Ides of March.
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Act I, Scene II
Printable View
Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, cry 'Caesar!".
Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.
Soothsayer: Beware the Ides of March.
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Act I, Scene II
From "The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot
Quote:
"I think all women are crosser than men," said Maggie. "Aunt Glegg's a
great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
father does."
"Well, _you'll_ be a woman some day," said Tom, "so _you_ needn't
talk."
"But I shall be a _clever_ woman," said Maggie, with a toss.
Quote:
"Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable
aphorisms,--"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have
a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good
old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive
Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a
reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody
sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the
frankest incivility to his father-in-law.
Anthem, Any Rand:
"It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect."
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
"How absurd those words are, such as beast, and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men."
"Well look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a puma, or a giraffe. You can't help seeing all of them are right. They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky."
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, fare more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties, and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures, and religions overlap. A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization.
The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett
First lines:
Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.
- who had pity for you, when you were sad among the strangers
James Joyce
"Oh, it's miserable to be human. You get such queer diseases. Just because you're human and for no other reason. Before you know it, as the years go by, you're just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it?"
--------------------------------------------------------
The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnaper - this gipsy? It is the strangeness of life - a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood.
--------------------------------------------------------
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
--------------------------------------------------------
"Fear is a ruler of mankind. It has the biggest dominion of all. It makes you white as candles. It splits each eye in half. More of fear than of any other thing has been created ... As a molding force it comes second only to Nature itself...
It applies to everyone. Though nothing may be visible, still it is heard, like radio. It is on almost all the frequencies. And all tremble, and all are wincing, in greater or lesser degree."
--------------------------------------------------------
"We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects but endless fire."
--------------------------------------------------------
"Oh, you can't get away from rhythm ... You just can't get away from it. The left hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole talks back to the diastole, the hands play patty-cake, and the feet dance with each other. And the seasons. And the stars, and all of that. And the tides, and all that junk. You've got to live at peace with it, because if it's going to worry you, you'll lose. You can't win against it. It keeps on and on and on... we'll never get away from rhythm..."
"The first and the best victory is to conquer self." - Plato, The Republic
Hi,
New here; first post. I offer a few quotes from The Sound and the Fury, which I'm about halfway through right now:
"The day like a pane of glass struck a light, sharp blow."
"On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand."
"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
"The watch ticked on."
(only meaningful in context of novel, but so forceful and symbolic)
"The English take and do nothing"
The above quotation is taken from "A passage to India" by E. M Forster.
It's a narration of the author about how English ruled in India in the eighteenth century.
"What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the Russians extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they charish them, but they don't hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary they are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with enthusiam, a sweeping abundance with such an aptness of application sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can't defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they say."
---Joseph Conrad; "Under Western Eyes"
Famous quotes compilation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tkhoEzwt4Y
"Poor, unhappy erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be "some one," like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius OR USE IT TO PLAY TRICKS WITH, when, with an nordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera Ghost."
~Gaston Leroux, "Le Fantome De L'Opera"
*sighs* my poor, poor Erik... Yes, we must needs pity him. :)
The Portrait of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde
Quote:
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion.
A few of my favourites:
- Henry David Thoreau, listening to owls outside his cabin in Walden woods and letting his imagination wander.Quote:
It is no honest and blunt tu-whit-tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to here their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins in the scenery of their transgressions.
- Hunter S. Thompson on the collapse of the 60's hippy movement.Quote:
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of victory over the forces of Old an Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
- Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable ThingsQuote:
He says my daughter and all the love he has wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all of the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
will someday become Buddha. Now this 'someday' is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection.
Herman Melville- Moby Dick
Quote:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."
William Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury
Absalom, AbsalomQuote:
"I seed de beginning, en now I sees de ending."
Shakespeare- HamletQuote:
"You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."
Quote:
The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
G.K. Chesterton- Orthodoxy
Quote:
"That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point- and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching on a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionist choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, but let the atheist choose themselves a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."
The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde
Quote:
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us.
I started reading Paradise Lost today and this one line said by Satan really struck me as a pretty awesome quote.
Quote:
The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
'The past has all the time in the world. It's only the future which is running out.'
--------------------------------------------------------
Nobody ever died of feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.
and the best quote ever
"no hell is colder then the house where my soul is clogged"
from David L. Swift in Canon (2001).
a damned good novel.
Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien :D
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."
'All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.'
“I do not love the bright sword for it's sharpness, nor the arrow for it's swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend” - Faramir
“Courage is found in unlikely places.”
"...a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought - devil knows what foreign nations. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully - and I take liberty to call myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word as far as I know."
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"
I really enjoyed reading that book; more so than Heart of Darkness.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gilliatt Gurgle
The grafting of fruit trees has always interested me. Here's a couple of lines on this topic from one of the many great books by John McPhee.
From Oranges by John McPheeQuote:
In Florida, most orange trees have lemon roots. In California, nearly all lemon trees are grown on orange roots.
Stendhal The Red and the BlackQuote:
'Politics,' the author resumes, 'are a stone attached to the neck of liter-
ture, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of
imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The
noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with the
sound of any of the instruments.
Thanks for the ammunition!Quote:
Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow
My wife and her family are notorious for wedging politics into any conversation killing the moment.
I cant't wait to use that one.
I'll throw in a few quick bursts of prose from E. M. Forster's Howard's End:
---Quote:
'You and I have built up something real, because it is purely spiritual. There's no veil of mystery over us. Unreality and mystery begin as soon as one touches the body. The popular view is, as usual, exactly the wrong one. Our bothers are over tangible things--money, husbands, house-hunting. But Heaven will work of itself' (Ch. 23)
This book is so surprisingly beautiful and touching that I couldn't believe Forster wasn't a woman. He is a man isn't he? ;)Quote:
'Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.
[...]
She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.' (Ch. 22)
"Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The one's that don't make it are those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies"
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Gilliatt
Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
--------------------------------------------------------
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
--------------------------------------------------------
No shortage of explanations for life's mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find.
--------------------------------------------------------
"The true miracle of reason ... is reason's victory over the miraculous."
--------------------------------------------------------
We leave home not only to make room for ourselves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don't want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in our turn. Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.
--------------------------------------------------------
When the impossible becomes a necessity, it can sometimes be achieved.
--------------------------------------------------------
"Find your enemy. When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for."
--------------------------------------------------------
If the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend.
--------------------------------------------------------
The problem is not technical. You're worried about wings? Look on your shoulders. There they are. The problem, pal, is not wings but balls.
--------------------------------------------------------
What's the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where's the nearest edge? Jump off it.
--------------------------------------------------------
A man's worth reveals itself in the hour of his greatest adversity. What is our value when the chips are down? Do we merely flatter to deceive, or are we the real thing, the stuff of alchemists' dreams? These, too, are questions to which most of us, mercifully, are never required to supply answers.
--------------------------------------------------------
The world is irreconcilable, it doesn't add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can't make judgements or choices. We can't live.
--------------------------------------------------------
In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles... Beatitude is the prisoner's surrender to his chains.
--------------------------------------------------------
Down with a world where the guarantee that we won't die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom!
----------------------------------------------------------
A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host's best rug.
"So listen ... what do you really want to do with your life? ... Just briefly, you know, summarize... And don't tell me you enjoy working with children, okay?"
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved... The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind... It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.
--------------------------------------------------------
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
--------------------------------------------------------
Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches . . . .
--------------------------------------------------------
'Everyone has a demon ... but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it.'
--------------------------------------------------------
Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
--------------------------------------------------------
'Things get in the way ... that's what's sad about life.'
--------------------------------------------------------
People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much... Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, they treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
--------------------------------------------------------
There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
"The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to proceed from that thing like a ballonn he carried under his overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat nape of neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge of horror and laughter."
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"
"Miss Schlegel, the real things' money and all the rest is a dream."
"You're still wrong. You've forgotten Death."
Leonard could not understand.
"If we lived for ever what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say 'I am I.'"
"Our reaction to the beautiful occurs in the face of every single one of our intellectual pretensions. We may be very well aware that the call of beauty is a siren-call, but that doesn't stop it from arresting us, seizing us, rendering us helpless. A soul-beguiling face will make anybody stop in their tracks, in spite of themselves."
--------------------------------------------------------
"Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust."
--------------------------------------------------------
"There's nothing - and I mean nothing - that doesn't look less serious if confessed, or shared... Tell the truth, and you'll see how the world carries on. Just try it."
--------------------------------------------------------
"You have to have time to create art. If you are busy surviving, then art doesn't probably get much of a look in."
---SPOILER---The conclusion:
"Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He'd had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn't put him in the cells; they hadn't sent his squad to the settlement; he'd swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he'd built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he'd smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he'd earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he'd bought that tobacco....
A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.
Three thousand six hundred and fifty three days.
The three extra days were for leap years"
"Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy."
--------------------------------------------------------
"One has to take the world as it comes. If we're here, it's surely to make the most of life."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... and even if the dream doesn't come true it's rather thrilling to have dreamt it."
--------------------------------------------------------
"You know, often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."
--------------------------------------------------------
"In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable ..."
--------------------------------------------------------
"You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth."
--------------------------------------------------------
"We're not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don't believe in."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled ..."
"I think you might do something better with the time . . . than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
--------------------------------------------------------
"Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"
--------------------------------------------------------
"You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it'll encourage me, you see."
The Stranger has possibly one of the best opening lines and final lines in 20th century literature