Janosch > Janosch's Quotes

“I love my haters, they rage and rage and all they do is spreading my word.”
― James Yeager

“ما أجمل أن تكون بصحبة أناس يقرأون”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Remind children that their successes and failures are not representations of their worth.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge

“For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone.
...
We leave you a tradition with a future.
The tender loving care of human beings will never become obsolete.
People even more than things have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.
Never throw out anybody.

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

Your “good old days” are still ahead of you, may you have many of them.”
― Sam Levenson, In One Era & Out the Other

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
― Aesop

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“Nur wer erwachsen wird und ein Kind bleibt, ist ein Mensch.”
― Erich Kästner

“It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.”
― Paul Auster, Oracle Night

“Be a lover of the world, it is the only way to survive in it.”
― Janosch

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

“People are more than just the way they look.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
― Jimi Hendrix, The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love | Guitar TAB Sheet Music Collection | Note-for-Note Transcriptions for Electric Guitar Players | Classic Psychedelic Rock Solos

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.”
― Aravind Adiga , The White Tiger

“I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.”
― Muhammad Yunus

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.”
― Muhammad Yunus

“The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Men sometimes come and question me
How many years my age may be,
Seeing my temples silver now
And flecks of snow upon my brow.

This is the answer that I give
"When I count up the life I live
Applying all my reason's power,
I make the total just one hour."

"And how", my questioner replies
In accents of amazed surprise,
"Mak'st thou this sum, which seems to me
Beyond all credibility?"

"One day", I answer," she I love
All other earthly things above
Lay in my arms, and like a thought
Her lips with mine I swiftly sought.

"And though the years before I die
Stretch out interminably, I
Shall only count my life in truth
As that brief hour of happy youth." -”
― Ibn Hazm, طوق الحمامة في الألفة والألاف

“How arrogant you are
To think your wretched Self so singular!
The disappointments of this world will die
In less time than the blinking of an eye,
And as the earth must pass, pass by the earth
Don't even glance at it, know what it's worth;
What empty foolishness it is to care
For what must one day be dispersed to air!”
― Farid ud-Din Attar

“Der sprachlose Papagei

Ein Kaufmann einen Papagei vor Jahren
besaß, in Sang und Rede wohl erfahren.
Der saß als Wächter an des Ladens Pforte
und sprach zu jedem Kunden kluge Worte.
Denn wohl der Menschenkinder Sprache kannt er,
doch seinesgleichen Weisen auch verstand er.
Vom Laden ging nach Haus einst sein Gebieter
und ließ den Papagei zurück als Hüter.
Ein Kätzlein plötzlich in den Laden sprang,
um eine Maus zu fangen; todesbang,
flatterte hin und her der Papagei
und stieß ein Glas mit Rosenöl entzwei.
von seinem Hause kam der Kaufmann wieder
und setzte sorglos sich im Laden nieder
und stieß das Rosenöl allüberall,
im Zorn schlug er das Haupt des Vogels kahl.
Die Zeit verstrich, der Vogel sprach nicht mehr.
Da kam die Reu´, der Kaufmann seufzte schwer.
Raufte sich den Bart und rief: "Weh mir umsponnen
ist mit Gewölk die Sonne meiner Wonnenn!
Wär mir, da auf den Redner ich den bösen
Schlag ausgeführt, doch lahm die Hand gewesen!"
Wohl gab er frommen Bettlern reiche Spende,
auf daß sein Tier die Sprache wiederfände;
umsonst! Als er am vierten Morgen klagend,
in tausend Sorgen, was zu machen sei,
daß wieder reden mög´sein Papagei,
ließ sich mit bloßem Haupt ein Büßer blicken,
den Schädel glatt wie eines Beckens Rücken.
Da hub der Vogel gleich zu reden an
und rief dem Derwisch zu: "Sag lieber Mann,
wie wurdest Kahlkopf du zum Kahlen? sprich!
Vergossest du vielleicht auch Öl wie ich?"
Man lachte des Vergleichs, daß seine Lage
der Vogel auf den Derwisch übertrage.”
― Rumi

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos