xylatra > xylatra's Quotes

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Each person's life – each lifeform,
in fact – represents a world, a
unique way in which the universe experiences itself.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world.
And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.”
― Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph

“Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly duplicated version of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.”
― Margaret Kennedy

“Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never known what I am? My vices, my virtues, are under my nose, but I can’t see them, nor stand far enough back to view myself as a whole. I seem to be a sort of flabby mass in which words are engulfed; no sooner do I name myself than what is named is merged in him who names, and one gets no farther. I have often wanted to hate myself and, as you know, had good reasons for so doing. But my attempted hatred of myself was absorbed into my insubstantiality and was nothing but a recollection. I could not love myself either, I am sure, though I have never tried to. But I was eternally compelled to be myself; I was my own burden, but never burdensome enough, Mathieu. For one instant, on that June evening when I elected to confess to you, I thought I had encountered myself in your bewildered eyes.
You saw me, in your eyes I was solid and predictable; my acts and moods were the actual consequences of a definite entity. And through me you knew that entity. I described it to you in my words, I revealed to you facts unknown to you, which had helped you to visualize it. And yet you saw it, I merely saw you seeing it. For one instant you were the heaven-sent mediator between me and myself, you perceived that compact and solid entity which I was and wanted to be in just as simple and ordinary a way as I perceived you. For, after all, I exist, I am, though I have no sense of being; and it is an exquisite torment to discover in oneself such utterly unfounded certainty, such unsubstantiated pride. I then understood that one could not reach oneself except through another’s judgment, another’s hatred. And also through another’s love perhaps; but there is here no question of that. For this revelation I am not ungrateful to you. I do not know how you would describe our present relations. Not goodwill, nor wholly hatred. Put it that there is a corpse between us. My corpse.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve

“If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Her wedding ring, her gentle brush-offs, and her outright rejection had been minor obstacles compared to the big no of another man kissing her cheek.”
― Karin Slaughter, Pretty Girls

“I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Life isn't as serious as my mind makes it out to be.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“The greater number of the young women, who envied Anna and had long been weary of hearing her called virtuous, rejoiced at the fulfillment of their predictions, and were only waiting for a decisive turn in public opinion to fall upon her with all the weight of their scorn. They were already making ready their handfuls of mud to fling at her when the right moment arrived.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve

“Die to the past every moment. You don't need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“These fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent, horrified him and, however much he tried to disguise the fact, estranged him from her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How often he had told himself that to be loved by her was happiness; and now that she loved him only as a woman can for whom love outweighs all that is good in life, he was much farther from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Levin had often noticed in discussion between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and endless logical subtleties and talk, the disputants finally became aware that what they had been at such pains to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being attacked. He had often had the experience of suddenly in the middle of a discussion grasping what it was the other liked and at once liking it too, and immediately he found himself agreeing, and then all arguments fell away useless. Sometimes the reverse happened: he at last expressed what he liked himself, which he had been arguing to defend and, chancing to express it well and genuinely, had found the person he was disputing with suddenly agree.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve

“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin

“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Every heart has its own skeletons.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina