Albatool > Albatool's Quotes

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence. Afterwards...I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you...I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child...Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly - a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?”
― Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions

“If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive.”
― pablo neruda

“إن معظم الناس مقتنعون بأنه طالما أنهم ليسوا مضطرين صراحة إلى عمل شيء بسبب قوة خارجية، فإن قراراتهم هي قراراتهم وأنهم إذا أرادوا شيئا فانهم هم الذين يريدونه. ولكن هذا هو أحد الأوهام الكبرى التي لدينا عن أنفسنا. إن عددا كبيرا من قراراتنا ليست حقا قراراتنا، بل أوحى بها لنا من الخارج، لقد نجحنا في اقناع أنفسنا بأننا نحن الذين نصنع القرار بينما نحن في الحقيقة نتطابق مع توقعات الآخرين مساقين بالخوف من العزلة وبتهديدات مباشرة أكثر إزاء حياتنا وحريتنا وراحتنا.”
― اريك فروم