Gopikanta > Gopikanta's Quotes

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role.”
― Robert Ezra Park

“Lest we forget:

It is easy to be human, very hard to be humane”
― Mirza Ghalib

“रोने से और इश्क़ में बेबाक हो गये,
धोये गये हम ऐसे कि बस पाक हो गये.

कहता है कौन नाला-ए-बुलबुल को बे-असर,
परदे में गुल कि लाख जिगर चाक हो गये.

करने गये थे उससे तग़ाफ़ुल का हम गिला,
की एक ही निगाह कि बस ख़ाक हो गये.

इस रंग से उठाई कल उसने असद की लाश,
दुश्मन भी जिसको देखके ग़मनाक हो गये.”
― Mirza Ghalib, Love Sonnets of Ghalib [Jul 01, 2002] Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

“Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be
Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back”
― Ram Mohan Roy

“When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins.”
― Carl Linnaeus

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Some people are nice and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”
― Svetlana Aleksievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Submission to the experimental data is the golden rule that dominates any scientific discipline.”
― Maurice Allais

“The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.

Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.

The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.

Only the rider's heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood of the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.”
― Judith Wright

“Naked Girl and Mirror

This is not I. I had no body once-
only what served my need to laugh and run
and stare at stars and tentatively dance
on the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun.
Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was gone
on my own currents, quicksilver, thistledown.
Can I be trapped at last in that soft face?

I stare at you in fear, dark brimming eyes.
Why do you watch me with that immoderate plea-
'Look under these curled lashes, recognize
that you were always here; know me-be me.'
Smooth once-hermaphrodite shoulders, too tenderly
your long slope runs, above those sudden shy
curves furred with light that spring below your space.

No, I have been betrayed. If I had known
that this girl waited between a year and a year,
I'd not have chosen her bough to dance upon.
Betrayed, by that little darkness here, and here
this swelling softness and that frightened stare
from eyes I will not answer; shut out here
from my own self, by its new body's grace-

for I am betrayed by someone lovely. Yes,
I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl.
Your lips in the mirror tremble as I refuse
to know or claim you. Let me go-let me be gone.
You are half of some other who may never come.
Why should I tend you? You are not my own;
you seek that other-he will be your home.

Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted with tears;
I lean to your kiss. I must serve you; I will obey.
Some day we may love. I may miss your going, some day,
though I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years.
Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too,
if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.”
― Judith A. Wright

“On this path, we are making a bet that underneath all of that, you are big and powerful and good. All of that power, that wisdom, and that excellence is your true nature. All you have to do is carve away and drop the bullshit.”
― David H. Wagner, Backbone: The Modern Man's Ultimate Guide to Purpose, Passion and Power

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

“People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

“The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“Right time, right place, right people equals success.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.”
― Idries Shah

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless : Tales of Transgression

“It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.”
― John Hersey, Hiroshima

“Green pine trees, cranes and
turtles ...
You must tell a story of your
hard times
And laugh twice.”
― John Hersey, Hiroshima

“A situation where people can grow old without having a job that rewards them individually while adding to the collective well-being is morally unacceptable.”
― Franco Modigliani

“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses