Brian Q. Pham > Brian's Quotes

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“What makes night within us may leave stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

“There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
― Pablo Picasso

“I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“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

“All perception of truth is the detection of analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861