Layla > Layla's Quotes

“But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing.”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Fame is the enemy of instinct and spontaneity, the difference between what is said and what ought to be said, and the transformation of one person into two”
― Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst: Journals

“The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache”
― Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.”
― Léon Bloy

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne , The Complete Essays

“People want to be loved; failing that admired; failing that feared; failing that hated and despised. They want to evoke some sort of sentiment. The soul shudders before oblivion and seeks connection at any price.”
― Hjalmar Soderberg, Doctor Glas

“I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“He did not think of love as an eternally vigilant, blazing flame, which with its powerful, flickering glow shown into all the peaceful folds of life and in some fantastic way made everything seem bigger and stronger than it was. For him, love was more like the calm, smoldering ember that gives off an even heat from its soft bed of ashes and in the muted twilight tenderly forgets what is distant and makes what is near seem twice as close and twice as intimate.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“She dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting—what is so easily forgotten—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“I had no illusions about you,' he said. 'I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. It's comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn't ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you'd only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn't care. Most people, as far as I can see, when they're in love with someone and the love isn't returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn't like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn't afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favor.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

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

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“I shall begin with the third sort of words; compound abstracts, such as virtue, honor, persuasion, docility. Of these I am convinced, that whatever power they may have on the passions, they do not derive it from any representation raised in the mind of the things for which they stand. As compositions, they are not real essences, and hardly cause, I think, any real ideas.”
― Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”
― Robert Burns, The complete poetical works of Robert Burns

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire