Nautes03 > Nautes03's Quotes

“You only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics,you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

“If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

“제가 이 글을 통해서 이미 오래 전에 흘러가버린 우리들의 청춘 시절을 다시 떠올려 차근차근 정리해보는 것은 비록 글쓰는 동안만이라도 당신과 함께 호흡을 나눌 수 있기 때문이요, 그 속에서나마 우리가 이별을 모르는 세상에서 함께 영원히 살아 있을 수 있다는 간절한 생각 때문입니다. 또 이 문필 작업이 그 뜨거웠던 당신의 순정에 대한 나의 작은 보답이 될 수도 있지 않을까 하는 어줍잖은 마음도 전혀 없지는 않았습니다.
그런 심정으로 추억의 조각들을 하나하나 글로 풀어내다보니 지난날의 아기자기했던 추억들이 마치 옹달샘에 맑은 물이 고이듯 졸졸 고이고 봄풀이 돋아나듯 소록소록 돋아나서, 저는 어느 틈에 우리들 청춘의 생생한 필름을 혼자서 돌려보는 기막힌 환상에 빠지곤 했습니다. 한마디로 행복한 시간이었습니다.”
― 김자야, 내 사랑 백석

“Here is Christianity with its marvellous parable of the Prodigal Son to teach us indulgence and pardon. Jesus was full of love for souls wounded by the passions of men; he loved to bind up their wounds and to find in those very wounds the balm which should heal them. Thus he said to the Magdalen: "Much shall be forgiven thee because thou hast loved much," a sublimity of pardon which can only have called forth a sublime faith.

Why do we make ourselves more strict than Christ? Why, holding obstinately to the opinions of the world, which hardens itself in order that it may be thought strong, do we reject, as it rejects, souls bleeding at wounds by which, like a sick man's bad blood, the evil of their past may be healed, if only a friendly hand is stretched out to lave them and set them in the convalescence of the heart?”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils, La dame aux camélias

“Well, sir, embrace me once, as you would embrace your daughter, and I swear to you that that kiss, the only chaste kiss I have ever had, will make me strong against my love, and that within a week your son will be once more at your side, perhaps unhappy for a time, but cured forever.”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils, La dame aux camélias

“Morality, too, is a question of time.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“The legal reporter came out of his cubicle shouting that two bodies of unidentified girls were in the city morgue. Frightened, I asked him: What age? Young, he said. They may be refugees from the interior chased here by the regime's thugs. I sighed with relief. The situation encroaches on us in silence, like a bloodstain, I said. The legal reporter, at some distance now, shouted: "Not blood, Maestro,shit.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We'll win, of course," he said.
"You don't want that," said the demon.
"Why not, pray?“
“Listen," said Crowley desperately, "how many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean."
Aziraphale looked taken aback.
"Well, I should think-" he began.
"Two," said Crowley. "Elgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“There doesn't have to be any of that business with one third of the seas turning to blood or anything," said Aziraphale happily. When it came, the voice sounded slightly annoyed. "Why not?" it said. Aziraphale felt an icy pit opening under his enthusiasm, and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. He plunged on: "Well, you can simply make sure that—" "We will win, Aziraphale." "Yes, but—" "The forces of darkness must be beaten. You seem to be under a misapprehension. The point is not to avoid the war, it is to win it. We have been waiting a long time, Aziraphale.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“That's right," said Pepper. "Because," she added, "if we beat them, we'd have to be our own deadly enemies. It'd be me an' Adam against Brian an' Wensley," She sat back. "Everyone needs a Greasy Johnson," she said.
"Yeah," said Adam. "That's what I thought. It's no good anyone winning. That's what I thought." He stared at Dog, or through Dog.
"Seems simple enough to me," said Wensleydale, sitting back. "I don't see why it's taken thousands of years to sort out.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset cos' they act like people", said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.”
― Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“She'd run her life according to the Prophecies and now there were no more Prophecies. She must be feeling like a train which had reached the end of the line but still had to keep going, somehow.
From now on she'd be able to go through life with everything coming as a surprise, just like everyone else. What luck.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Something told him that something was coming to an end. Not the world, exactly. Just the summer. There would be other summers, but there would never be one like this. Ever again.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“It was written in London under the advancing shadow of the Second World War, and it may be that the apprehensionsof those years can be felt vibrating from time to time in its pages. The historian,concerned as he is with the most vital of all studies, is often more subject than herealizes to the electric currents of contemporary mood.”
― C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War

“Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Imperfection is not our personal problem - it is a natural part of existing.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just “real life.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“After several days, I had a pivotal interview with my teacher. When I described how I’d become so overwhelmed, she calmly asked, “How are you relating to the presence of desire?” I was startled into understanding. Her question pointed me back to the essence of mindfulness practice: It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience. For me, desire had become the enemy, and I was losing the battle. She advised me to stop fighting my experience and instead investigate the nature of my wanting mind. Desire was just another passing phenomenon, she reminded me. It was attachment or aversion to it that was the problem.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

“Before his and Pushkin's advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called "classical" writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim "accepted colors" (in the sense of "idées reçues") yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

“The social science fear the radical impulse in literary studies, and over the decades, we in the humanities have trivialized the social sciences into their rational expectation straitjackets, not recognizing that, whatever the state of the social sciences in our own institution, strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the humanities in the area studies paradigm are now around.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single “teacher's” “students,” flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism “to come,” aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of “Little Britain” leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, “Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence but an idea: and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness