Aiden > Aiden 's Quotes

“The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--”
― Issa Kobayashi, The Dumpling Field: Haiku of Issa

“When everything is lonely, I can be my best friend.”
― Conor Oberst

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.”
― Fiona Apple

“So, you can make me come, that doesn't make you Jesus.”
― Tori Amos

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”
― Jack Kornfield, Buddha's Little Instruction Book

“They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I am determined to practice deep listening. I am determined to practice loving speech.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

“This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away. If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. If a person does not know what hunger is, he or she will never know the joy of eating every day. Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding, of our happiness.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“As if you were on fire from within.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
― Pablo Neruda

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skilful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile.”
― Emmanuel Lévinas

“The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi.”
― Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

“History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality--if only for an instant--by means of creation.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“The past reappears because it is a hidden present.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Reversibility: seeing through opaqueness, not-seeing through transparency. The wooden door and the glass door: two opposite facets of the same idea. This opposition is resolved in an identity: in both cases we look at ourselves looking. Hinge procedure. The question “What do we see?” confronts us with ourselves.”
― Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare