سَحَرْ > سَحَرْ's Quotes

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“But all the magic I have known
I've had to make myself.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you.”
― Jalaluddin Rumi

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, whiuch you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiing himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“It cannot be denied that he was generally very unhappy; and he could make others unhappy also, that is, when he loved them or they him. For all who got to love him, saw always only the one side in him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just, with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“employers sense in me a denial of their values...they fear me. i suspect that they can see that i am forced to function in a century which i loathe.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, onthis distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self—he who has known these days of hell may be contente indeed with normal half-and-half days like today. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no particularly disgusting scandal been unveiled in the worlds of politics or finance. Thankfully you tune the strings of your moldering lyre to a moderated, to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly stupefied half-and-half god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm look as like each other as two peas.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Everything not forbidden is compulsory”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.”
― Leon Krier, The Architecture of Community

“She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by-
And never knew.”
― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

“Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“He wasted his wishes on wishing.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
― Henry David Thoreau

“We can't hold hands―
Someone might see.
Won't you please
Hold toes with me?”
― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

“I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“What I think," Chatty says, "is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“A genius is the one most like himself.”
― Thelonious Monk

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”
― George R.R. Martin

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi