Anya > Anya's Quotes

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”
― Rumi

“We cannot take a single step towards heaven.
It is not In our power to travel in a vertical direction.
If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.
He raises us easily.”
― Simone Weil

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”
― Simone Weil

“To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: James Carse

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“For some, the blackness or darkness of the Madonna remains unresolved. Some claim that the Madonna is black because she survived fires that destroyed all but her; others say that she was darkened by candle smoke. I say that she is dark because she has entered so many lives on fire, because she's absorbed so much suffering. Some conclude that the Madonna is black for no reason, that her darkness means nothing. Others say she is a symbol, an archetype, psyche's shadow. I say that the Black Madonna is all these things and that she is a black woman, a woman of color, a brown woman, a red woman, and more. She is not white. She is more, she includes all colors. She is dark because we come in so many colors, hues, and shades, and no one, no one is to be left out.”
― China Galland, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means. Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”
― Susan Sontag

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”
― Anaïs Nin

“When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only.
She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious.”
― Anais Nin

“A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
― Anais Nin

“David set his foot in a gap higher up the barbed wire...When would the searchlight come?They could not be certain of hitting him in the dark...and if they did not hurry, he would be over...Why didn't they hurry up. Then he stopped. He would run no more.When the beam of light caught him,they should see him walking away quite calmly. Then they would not enjoy it so much; they would feel cheated. The thought filled David with triumph. I am David”
― anne holm

“Truth lights up the soul in proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity. It isn't the quantity of metal which matters, but the degree of alloy. In this respect, a little pure gold is worth a lot of pure gold. A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth. Similarly, one perfect Greek statue contains as much beauty as two perfect Greek statues.”
― Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

“To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.”
― Bill Watterson

“I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.”
― Robin Williams

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.

The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.

Trial and error is freedom.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”
― Anaïs Nin