Life and Existence
Platão
[ Socrates speaking :] Let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all. . . . When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learned or discovered the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what “knowing” means.
Platão
[ Socrates speaking :] Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. . . . Like to us. . . . Tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?
Platão
[ Socrates speaking :] If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Platão
[ Socrates speaking :] Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?
Sylvia Plath
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
Sylvia Plath
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
Sylvia Plath
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Luigi Pirandello
Yes, but haven’t you perceived that it isn’t possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?
Pablo Picasso
When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Octavio Paz
No doubt the nearness of death and the brotherhood of men-at-arms, at whatever time and in whatever country, always produces an atmosphere favorable to the extraordinary, to all that rises above the human condition and breaks the circle of solitude that surrounds each one of us.
Boris Pasternak
One day Lara went out and did not come back. . . . She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.
Boris Pasternak
One day Lara went out and did not come back. . . . She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.
Boris Pasternak
All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.
