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For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
Leonardo da Vinci
This one isn't my favorite quote per se, but I found it today and thought it was a real good one.
^^ Reminds me of one of Rumi's - "My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that; and I intend to end up there."
da Vinci's are great. . a few years ago I downloaded some of his writings, along with a lot of others, to shore up some of my knowledge. . . it was extremely worth it! I got them from Gutenberg.org.
Poor Shaw. I might be an idiot in his final analysis, since I am so patriotic that I would burn our flag in public if it were to be used by those who never understood freedom.
But those were the blinded days of Foucault, also. He and Shaw farted well as they found it necessary.
"Happiness is wishing to be what you are." Erasmus.
Because Living Well is the Best Revenge, or because Happiness gets harder as I get older, because my standards get higher. Not sure why.
“There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.” - Andrew Solomon.
I first know him in a TED Talk and he just got my heart. The way he talk and how he used words was totally awesome.
Most important, I love what he said
"Honour and common sense; in light of the other, both of them are ridiculous." ~ Louis de Bernieres
some years before nike came out with their "just do it" slogan, they had one that has stuck with me since:
"there is no finish line"
I like it because its very true and it also reminds me of an organizing principle I hold dear, "where there is life, there is hope."
Not really sure if my favorite is my own statement because it has described my "philosophy" for as long as I can remember thinking of such things. The "quote" is -"for every freedom granted one man, another man must assume a responsibility". I would be grateful if anyone could identify the origin of this phrase as I'm pretty sure it's not mine. Really would appreciate any enlightenment on possible origin, web searches have been no help. I always thought it was Nietzsche but can't confirm.
I have two more I like:
When felling stifled, limited, marginalized. - "I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing." - Thomas Jefferson
My final, when feeling overwhelmed but still must carry on, preferably efficiently and without need for whining. - "It's hard to remember that your primary goal was to drain the swamp when you're up to your *** in alligators". Origin unknown, comes from a sign above shift manager's desk in very harried production environment.
Three of Marlowe's comments in Heart of Darkness have always stayed with me: "We live as we dream -- alone."
"I don't like work -- no man does -- but I like what is in work -- the chance to find yourself."
"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
In spite of Conrad's cultural/historical limitations (which we all suffer from), he speaks with one of the first existential voices of the twentieth century. One can hear phrases such as these echo in Hemingway, Sartre, and Camus. In the third quote, he also acknowledges with matter-of-fact acceptance that regrets are the foundation for most human lives, for our knowledge and insight, and to try to live without them, is to, in some way, not have lived at all. Furthermore, such contemporary phrases like "No regrets," as a philosophical alternative, would in Conrad's view (quite literally) miss the boat.
I will leave two:
1)Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.--William Anderson Scott (some claim this for Euripedes)
2) Those whom the gods would save, they dower with compassion.--I don't know who said this. Does anyone here know?
“I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.”
― Kenneth Clark, Civilisation
"What,you egg?"-Shakespeare
I like the following quote by Vladimir Nabokov as a motivator at the beginning of the writing process: The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
These Donald Trump quotes:
"Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make."
"My whole life is about winning."
"I like thinking big. If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big."
"Work to live. Do not live to work"
French belief
So why do they have such a short working week and more national holidays than most EU countries?
I include GB at the current juncture.
We can endure any truth, however destructive, provided it replace everything, provided it affords as much vitality as the hope for which is substitutes.
It sounds even better in original:
On peut supporter n'importe quelle vérité, si destructrice soit-elle, à condition qu'elle tienne lieu de tout, qu'elle compte autant de vitalité que l'espoir auquel elle s'est substituée.
E.M. Cioran, De l'inconvénient d'être né
Hello everybody,
I want to share with you the first paragraph of one of my favourite novels, The Egyptian by Mika Waltari.
"I, SINUHE, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this. I donot write it to the glory of the gods in the land of Kem, for I am weary of gods, nor to the glory of the Pharaohs, for I am weary of their deeds. I write neither from fear nor from any hope of the future but for myself alone. During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be theprey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; andherein I differ from all other writers, past and to come."
"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools." Bonaparte
Never let success get to your head. Never let failure get to your heart.
"The Soul selects her own Society - then - Shuts the door to her divine majority" - Emily Dickinson
It had me write this song : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v7...&feature=share
"Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre." Gail Godwin
Favorite quote in what category? I'm rather fond of (this is regarding directing Theatre) "90% of directing, is correcting the mistakes you made in casting." Pablo Neruda from THE CAPTAIN'S VERSES Letter on the Road: ...' and in the midst of life I shall be
always
beside the friend, facing the enemy,
with your name on my mouth
and a kiss that never
broke away from yours. ' ...
And KING LEAR has several:
...' As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.' ...
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"I am not crying," said Miss Pross; "you are."
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter XVIII. Nine Days.
"I'm not crying. You are." is a popular internet meme, but nobody is crediting Dickens for this. It is possible someone thought of this apart from A Tale of Two Cities, but Dickens should still get the credit.
Any other Internet memes from classics?
The villainy you teach me/ I will execute
From Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. So many ways to read it, but I tend to go with the way you treat me is how I will treat you. It's helped me get through some fairly hideous stuff.
Michael Pritchard
"You don't stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing".
Veni, vidi. vici.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
I wish I could tell you boys (slightly drunk) just what the hell this is all gonna mean to us years from now. We're storin' up memories, and that's a fact. They ain't, all right I said ain't even if I am in college, but s__t I'm just plain folks, they ain't a one of you I'll ever forget, that's the goddam Lesbian truth.
from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead
Over the years people have speculated as to what this expression means and it is actually quite simple:
Several millennia ago each segment of society had its own gods or goddesses just like today when Catholic have their patron saints for, say, bakers or travelers or any other line of work. To the ancients in various cultures, lesbians had their own goddesses. Perhaps by no strange coincidence to various pagan cultures, the goddesses of lesbians were also the goddesses of Truth.
What did this mean to ancient pagans? It needs to be understood that same sex amorous affairs were far more common and more accepted than they are today. In fact there were some that practiced sexual exclusion such as the Amazons and their male counterparts Gargareans. Both tribes practiced homosexuality. There were others historically though very few in number. To the ancients very often the lesbian relationship was viewed as the most honest and most natural form of human relationship. Thus, no surprise that their goddess of Truth were also goddesses of lesbians.
“The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.”
― Alan Alda, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned
not a quote in the strictest sense but I just read this from pushkin's "the moor of peter the great" and thought it worth sharing:
"the delightful attention of women, almost the sole aim of man's exertions..."
call it a divine literary coincidence....I was just looking at a transcript from an old "family guy" episode, the one where they do their version of three Stephen king stories, and I found this (from the "stand by me" story):
"We talked into the night, the kind of talk that seemed important until you discover girls."
as to the "why" of both of those quotes...id says it because they seem fundamentally true and worth being reminded of.