Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is the little rift within the lute,

 

My only love sprung from my only hate!

 

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

 

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.

 

Da mi basia mille.

 

Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,

 

I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

 

I rang them up while touring Timbucktoo, Those bosom chums to whom you’re known as “Who?”

 

It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all.

 

O vocables of love, The end of an end is an echo, A last cry follows a last cry. Finality of finality Is perfection’s touch of folly.

 

He seems so near, and yet so far.

 

Love is and was my lord and king.

 

’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. 3

 

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal’d: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.

 

And o’er the hills and far away Beyond their utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, across the day, Through all the world she followed him.

 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 

I will drink Life to the lees.

 

a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake, a decrepit frenzy, and rightly viewed, a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.

 

“I hate you, I hate you!” cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.

Everything has gone from me but the certaintyof your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two people could havebeen happier than we have been.

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporaryarrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passedthrough, and they milked you for what youwere worth, mostly when you were young andgullible.

We said there warn’t no home like a raft, afterall. Other places do seem so cramped up andsmothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

I had three chairs in my house; one forsolitude, two for friendship; three for society.When visitors came in larger and unexpectednumbers there was but the third chair for themall, but they generally economized the room bystanding up.

They told him that their ancestors had fled the disorders of Ch’in times and, havingtaken refuge here with wives and childrenand neighbors, had never ventured out again; consequently they had lost all contact with the outside world.

Hail, fellow, well met,

Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift . . . that’s nausea.

She has always been there, my darling.

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

In a month, in a year, how will we bear that so many seas separate me from you?

But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

“My uncle always was respected;

My fair one, let us swear an eternal friendship.

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.

In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning.

Soon the birds and ancients

While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.”

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

N’attendez pas le jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours .

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux .

I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.