Bertie King > Bertie's Quotes

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“The two of us could form a new kind of union; we could be free together.”
― Consuelo De Saint-Exupery, The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“What cannot be cured must be endured.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“A quiet mind cureth all. ”
― Robert Burton

“All Poets are mad.”
― Robert Burton

“Though not necessarily aware of when we feel purpose and meaning, we are nearly always aware of the sickening feeling when we don't possess them. This isn't an intellectual misapprehension; it is a gut sense of disorientation and a loss of personal direction. Rarely are brute mental effort and self-help pep talks able to rekindle the missing feeling. For most of us, we simply wait patiently, knowing from past experience that the feeling will return in its own sweet time . . . Of particular interest is [Tolstoy's] conclusion as to the inability of science and reason to provide a personal sense of meaning.”
― Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

“The eyes are the harbingers of love, and the first step of love is sight.”
― Robert Burton

“The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.”
― Reginald Horace Blyth

“The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.”
― Reginald Horace Blyth

“The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.”
― Reginald Horace Blyth

“Nothing divides one so much as thought.”
― Reginald Horace Blyth

“Freedom is not doing what you like, but liking what you do.”
― R. H. Blyth, Haiku

“A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature.”
― R. H. Blyth, Haiku

“The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them—these sticks, stones, feathers, shells—there is no Deity.”
― R.H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics

“Two came here, Two flew off,— Butterflies. Chora3 In this verse, the ordinary poetical meaning is discarded; what remains is that dark flame of life that burns in all things. It is seen with the belly, not with the eye; with "bowels of compassion.”
― R. H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics 1: From the Upanishads to Huineng

“These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.”
― Reginald Horace Blyth

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.”
― Anthony Powell

“Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.”
― Anthony Powell

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.”
― Anthony Powell

“For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing