Vivek V > Vivek's Quotes

“During Aurangzeb’s rule, which lasted for forty-nine years from 1658 onwards, there were many phases during which Pandits were persecuted. One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.”
― Rahul Pandita, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Beauty means realising that everything is beautiful and all things are within you.”
― Pete Brigham

“Peace is a choice. We make this choice when we remember the Oneness that unites us all.”
― Pete Brigham

“There's no permanence to the sand castles we build here, so we shouldn't be hurt when the tide comes in and washes ours down. Immortals can only forgive.”
― Pete Brigham

“On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's 70th birthday. "Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”
― Albert Einstein

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“Hapiness is as exclusive as a butterfly, and you must never pursue it. If you stay very still, it may come and settle on your hand. But only briefly. Savour those moments, for they will not come in your way very often.”— Ruskin Bond”
― Manav Kaul, Tumhare Baare Mein

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I touched you and my life stopped”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I figured a woman can't be understood the way a man can. Women have purposes men can't even imagine.”
― Craig Davidson, Cataract City

“There was no friend of Kant's but considered the day on which he was to dine with him as a day of pleasure. Without giving himself the air of an instructor, Kant really was so in the very highest degree. The whole entertainment was seasoned with the overflow of his enlightened mind, poured out naturally and unaffectedly upon every topic, as the chances of conversation suggested it; and the time flew rapidly away, from one o'clock to four, five, or even later, profitably and delightfully. Kant tolerated no calms, which was the name he gave to the momentary pauses in conversation, or periods when its animation languished.”
― Thomas de Quincey, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant

“It was while teaching at this school that Auden experienced the vision that lay at the heart of “A Summer Night.” He later wrote about it in these words: One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“We carry our fresh air with us, wherever we go. He who has it, has it anywhere—nothing can rob him of it. I find in all characters that live close to nature, capriciousness, variability—they seem to pattern after nature’s higher rules. The children are that way, and dogs, cats—not but that their perceptions, intuitions, are keen enough, but with the capricious, too.”
― Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America: A Library of America Special Publication

“our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty. Authors of books on “the humble home” often mention this feature of the poetics of space. But this mention is much too succinct. Finding little to describe in the humble home, they spend little time there; so they describe it as it actually is, without really experiencing its primitiveness, a primitiveness which belongs to all, rich and poor alike, if they are willing to dream. But our adult life is so dispossessed of the essential benefits, its anthropocosmic ties have become so slack, that we do not feel their first attachment in the universe of the house.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“And then I awoke, and just as Auden did when he awoke from his dream of the croquet match, I felt that I had been vouchsafed a vision. It was a feeling of utter elation and goodwill—in other words, a feeling of agape. I felt bathed in the warm, golden glow of this feeling. Some year later my wife and I were having dinner with psychiatrist friends in an Edinburgh restaurant. The talk turned to dreams, and I recounted my dream. Unfortunately, as I did so, there was a lull in the conversation at nearby tables, with the result that others heard what I had to say. At the end there was silence. Then one of the psychiatrists said: “I know what your dream is about.” A pin could have been heard to drop. “Mrs. MacGregor is your mother.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“I came on my mother shedding a few tears in the drawing room. My mother had hastily blown her nose and spoken to me in an irritated way—a rare thing for her. I knew she knew she should not have been doing it—such demonstrations either of grief or happiness were not the thing at all—and so I was not upset by her crossness, feeling that we had been caught out, as it were, together, and that we must both do better in future.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“The end of the war brought the closing of the borders cutting off Austria’s coal supply from Czechoslovakia, leaving the Austrians at peace but hungry, cold, and vulnerable to tuberculosis and a virulent form of influenza (Grosskurth, 1991, p. 82). Writer Stefan Zweig described postwar Vienna as “an uncertain, gray, and lifeless shadow of the former imperial monarchy” (qtd. in Gay, 1988, p. 380).”
― Daniel Benveniste, The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna and W. Ernest Freud: Three Generations of Psychoanalysis

“the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.”
― David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations

“At ebb time—a time which must come to all, pretty or rich, treasures are discovered upon some shores; or golden sands are seen when the waters run low. In others bare rocks, slime, or reptiles. May I never be at low tide with a bore!”
― Maria Edgeworth, Thoughts on Bores: 'Wit is often its own worst enemy''

“Besides the bore condescending, who, whether good-natured or ill-natured, is a most provoking animal—there is the bore facetious, an insufferable creature, always laughing, but with whom you can never laugh. And there is another exotic variety—the vive la bagatelle bore of the ape kind—who imitate men of genius. Having early been taught that there is nothing more delightful than the unbending of a great mind, they set about continually to unbend the bow in company.”
― Maria Edgeworth, Thoughts on Bores: 'Wit is often its own worst enemy''

“The bishop has pushed himself to the limits of his reputation to avoid any connection to the distasteful funeral going on across the way. Yet he knows, along with all of Copenhagen, that the events below are all anyone is talking about. They will be in all the papers tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It is of paramount importance that these papers record that the newly minted Bishop of all Denmark, Hans L. Martensen, shepherd to the nation, was not present at the burial of his former student, now the scourge of all Christendom, Søren Kierkegaard.”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life

“Religious citizens remembered him as the promising theologian who spoke and wrote endlessly about Christianity and yet who did not become a pastor and now never even went to church. Romantic citizens vaguely suspected this stillborn church career was somehow connected to the scandal of his broken engagement years before. “Such a sweet young girl,” they would whisper to each other, “and taken off by her new husband to the West Indies! It’s almost like they were escaping something, or someone.”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life

“Søren had said he wanted to upset blind habits and overturn easy assumptions. In this, if nothing else, he had succeeded.”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life

“So it is that when on Friday, November 16, 1855, Denmark’s most venerable newspaper announced: “On the evening of Sunday, the eleventh of this month, after an illness of six weeks, Dr Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was taken from this earthly life, in his forty-third year, by a calm death, which hereby is sorrowfully announced on his own behalf of the rest of the family by his brother / P. Chr. Kierkegaard,” it did so with the full knowledge that enclosed in these simple lines raged a storm that threatened to spill out onto the quiet streets of Copenhagen and beyond. Or so they must have hoped.”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life

“The actual sound of Central European art music, especially the chamber music, was a solid part of me from an early age but maybe not audible in my music until almost five decades later, when I began to compose sonatas and unaccompanied string pieces as well as quite a lot of piano music. Though I did write a few string quartets for the Kronos Quartet, and some symphonies besides, these works from my forties, fifties, and sixties didn’t owe that much to the past. Now that I’m in my seventies, my present music does. It’s funny how it happened this way, but there it is.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“HEART: Think of the real stars that populate the heavens, Lerita. They don’t have to do anything to shine. It’s similar to the lovely flowers in your garden. They don’t try to be beautiful, they just are. That’s because they are fulfilling their purpose. And anything or anybody who is fulfilling his or her purpose in this world naturally shines and spreads joy. LERITA: Hmm, that sounds very astute. I shouldn’t try to be a star? HEART: Lerita, we all know a star when we see one—human or otherwise. They shine because they are not letting anything block the Divine Light that shines through them. LERITA: Whoa. I need to think about that. You’re saying that I need to be myself and I need to please God.”
― Lerita Coleman Brown, When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom

“It is almost incredible what a little stretch of nature will do to arouse a fellow—convert him, so to speak. I cannot think of a rarer experience than one I met on the river Saguenay, up there in Canada. The river’s water is an inky black—a curious study, I believe, to this day to the scientific men: take it up in a bucket, and it is still unmistakably black—the color of the stream. Oh! that great day! Down the stream a boat—sails open—wing-a-wing—one one side, one the other—patched, stained, heavy—but oh! how beautiful! It was a curious revelation out of little means. Wing-a-wing is rarely fine anyhow—I have not known it much in pictures—but few artists can accomplish it. See then, the large result of what may seem a small impulse. Why should we go hunt beauty then—I should rather ask—where can you go to get away from it?”
― Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America: A Library of America Special Publication