Emily B > Emily's Quotes

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.”
― Homer, The Iliad / The Odyssey

“But when Odysseus rose, that man of many devices, fixing his down-cast eyes on the ground he stood: nor his scepter swayed, either this way or that like a practiced speaker, but held it motionless, even as a man unskilled in the arts of persuasion. One would declare him mute with passion or wanting in judgment. But when he spoke, when his powerful voice went forth from his bosom, issuing words which fell like flakes of snow in winter, surely no mortal man might hope to compete with Odysseus. Lost in wonder we sat, but not, as before, at his manner.”
― Homer

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
― Plato

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato

“When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.”
― Plato

“The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”
― Plato, Plato's Republic

“…if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.”
― Plato, The Republic and Other Works

“καὶ οὗτος ἄρα καὶ ἄλλος πᾶς ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν τοῦ μὴ ἐτοίμου ἐπιθυμεῖ”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”
― Plato

“There were thousands and thousands of forms of joy in the world, but that all were essentially one and the same, namely, the joy of being able to love.”
― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”
― Anais Nin

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
― Anais Nin

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
― ANAIS NIN

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon. ”
― Anais Nin

“Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”
― Anais Nin, The Journals of Anais Nin

“Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being..”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test yout limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle