Iqbal Singh > Iqbal's Quotes

“Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite indepedent of anyone.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I do not know what I think until I write it.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Bear it like a man, even if you feel it like an ass. ”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed”
― Alan Watts

“When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”
― Alan Watts

“As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can't get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says 'That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge.'

[In this quote from 1973 Watts, remarkably, essentially anticipates the discovery (in the late 1990's) of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.]”
― Alan Watts

“How difficult it is to be simple.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved.
[Vincent Van Gogh]”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“There's no love without pain.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“First, we think all truth is beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain is good because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex is beautiful even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute is as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature and are woven into the design of life!”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“After all, the world is still great.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre.
[Vincent Van Gogh]”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Diligence does not work if there is a lack of innate talent.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gauguin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape are one. When I paint a peasant labouring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up into the peasant. I want them to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, and the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life….”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Every man must settle down once in a lifetime.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.”
― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

“Sadness to me is the happiest time,
When a shining city rises from the ruins of my drunken mind.
Those times when I'm silent and still as the earth,
The thunder of my roar is heard across the universe.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“For without you, I swear, the town
Has become like a prison to me.
Distraction and the mountain
And the desert, all I desire.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, Love: The Joy That Wounds: The Love Poems of Rumi

“For the thirst to possess your love,
Is worth my blood a hundred times.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, Love: The Joy That Wounds: The Love Poems of Rumi

“Bitter your acts, bitter am I,
Kindness your deeds, kindness am I,
Pleasant and gentle, so you are,
Fine honeyed lips and sweet talker.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, Love: The Joy That Wounds: The Love Poems of Rumi

“One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.”
― Colin Wilson

“It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.”
― Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche