tardogrado > tardogrado's Quotes

“If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
― Herodotus

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Are you a communist?"
"No I am an anti-fascist"
"For a long time?"
"Since I have understood fascism.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.”
― Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

“Only if we manage to see the universe as a single entity, in which every part reflects the whole and whose great beauty lies precisely in its variety, will we be able to understand exactly who and where we are.

Letters agains the war: Letter from Orsigna, 2001.”
― Tiziano Terzani

“Una strada c'è nella vita, e la cosa buffa è che te ne accorgi solo quando è finita. Ti volti indietro e dici «Oh, ma guarda, c'è un filo!». Quando vivi, non lo vedi, il filo, eppure c'è. Perché tutte le decisioni che prendi, tutte le scelte che fai sono determinate, tu credi, dal tuo libero arbitrio, ma anche questa è una balla. Sono determinate da qualcosa dentro di te che innanzitutto è il tuo istinto.”
― Tiziano Terzani, La fine è il mio inizio

“Per i prossimo dieci anni la tua vita sarà orribile, avrai grandi problemi e niente ti andrà bene", dice l'indovino. "E poi?", chiede ansioso il cliente. "Poi? Poi ci farai l'abitudine!”
― Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I am large, I contain multitudes”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass