Belinda > Belinda's Quotes

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
― Michel Foucault

“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”
― Idi Amin

“Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love
It is you in another time yet in the same space
It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn't live,
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
What makes you a stranger to them closest to you
and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists to live a life
not half a life”
― Gibran Khalil Gibran

“And never have I felt so deeply
at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”
― Albert Camus

“Det fattades bara, det fattades bara att jag skulle gå genom livet utan att nånsin ha varit din.”
― Hjalmar Söderberg, Den allvarsamma leken

“Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Edvard: Du har levat i en konstgjord värld, insnärd i konstgjorda känslor. Jag måste lära dig och dina barn att leva i verkligheten. Det är inte mitt fel att verkeligheten är ett helvete”
― Ingmar Bergman, Fanny och Alexander

“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.”
― Dante Alighieri

“And just as he who, with exhausted breath,
having escaped from sea to shore, turns back
to watch the dangerous waters he has quit, so did my spirit, still a fugitive,
turn back to look intently at the pass
that never has let any man survive.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“I am aware that sometimes people make choices because they perceive that it was their best option at the given time. In all my years, I have not met a man who has made a choice he felt he was not compelled to, or could not justify, given his understanding, his evolution, his fears, his debilitating desires, his awareness or his place on his journey.”
― Kabir Munjal, The Seeker of Nothing: A fable on owning your life

“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“If you could only tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily...”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“because when i feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then i feel the colonies aren't far enough. the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavory among all the stars: made foul by men. Then i feel i've swallowed gall, and its eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough to get away. but when i get a turn, i forget it all again. though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. i'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. but since i can't, an' nobody can, i'd better hold my peace, an' try an' life my own life: if i've got one to live, which i rather doubt.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the resumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“And however one might sentimentalise it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connections and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Pistachios are not just the most melatonin-rich nut, they are off the charts as the most melatonin-rich food ever recorded.2957 To get a physiological dose of melatonin, all you have to eat is two. Two cups? Two handfuls? No, just two pistachios. Pistachio nuts were found to contain 0.2 mg of melatonin per gram.2958 It only takes 0.3 mg of melatonin to cause the normal daily spike our brains give us, so just two nuts would presumably do the trick.2959”
― Michael Greger, How Not to Diet

“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.”
― Aldous Huxley , Island

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Jung

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther