Nataly Basterrechea > Nataly's Quotes

“I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

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

“Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it.”
― Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember

“Our prayers can go where we cannot...there are no borders, no prison walls, no doors that are closed to us when we pray.”
― Brother Andrew, And God Changed His Mind

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.”
― Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black

“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would be a gory, blood-smeared earth.”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
― Nicolas Chamfort

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Dare to love yourself
as if you were a rainbow
with gold at both ends.”
― Author-Poet Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak.”
― Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“The river that flows in you also flows in me.”
― Kabir

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“The worst prison would be a closed heart.”
― Pope John Paul II

“The future starts today, not tomorrow.”
― Pope John Paul II