Lisa > Lisa's Quotes

“To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as your were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ”
― Hermann Hesse

“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
― Hermann Hesse , Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”
― John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

“No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“The Master Speed

No speed of wind or water rushing by
but you have speed far greater. You can climb
back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
and back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
but in the rush of everything to waste,
that you may have the power of standing still--
off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
From one another once you are agreed
that life is only life forevermore
together wing to wing and oar to oar.”
― Robert Frost

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.”
― Julie Rugg, A Book Addict's Treasury

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“When love is not madness it is not love.”
― Pedro Calderon de la Barca

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
― Sharon Salzberg

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Hearts will break and people will hurt you, darling.” Her mother said. “But when you let those people control your outlook on the life, you only allow them to have a greater hold on your happiness. Once you accept the fact that every day is a new day to begin again, life becomes a much easier path to walk.”
― Courtney Giardina, Holding on to Georgia

“We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“The whole business of smoking is like forcing yourself to wear tight shoes just to get the pleasure of taking them off.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.”
― Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

“The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven