Herbst lied > Herbst's Quotes

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“…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

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.”
― Robert Browning, The complete poetical works of Browning

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”
― Charlotte Bronte

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
― Albert Einstein

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.”
― Anton Chekhov

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage”
― Fredrich Nietzsche

“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
― Epicurus

“، وقال : إن من صفقتم له لم يكن أنا
والكلمات التي
نطقت بها ليست كلماتي - بل هي مرايا
صغيرة ركِّزت أمامكم
تعكس شذرات من وجوهكم
أو توقعاتكم
وأمام كلماتي ذاتها ركزت أنا
ذاتي
كضوء آت من بعيد ، يسقط على
المرايا
. فيعكس برقاً باهراً يغشى عيونكم فلا تروني”
― Yannis Ritsos

“الغسق يهبط والأبواب تغلق
وتظل امرأة واحدة بلا جرة في حديقة
امرأة من الماء
شفافة في ضوء القمر
وزهرة في شعرها.”
― Yannis Ritsos

“أختي، لقد تركتني لتستندي على قلبك
وتنصتي إلى نبض الناس.
وحياتي تواصلت تحت سماء عينيك.
وكنتِ تجيئين -محبة رقيقة-
في الأمسيات التي كتبتُ فيها -وأنا أنحني صامتاً-
قصائدي الغاضبة عن حروب الضوء والدم التي لا تنتهي.
أحسستُ بحضورك خلف الليل.
وغطت سطحي البارد شجرة الساعات الحانية
عندما سمعت وقع أقدامك.
كنت تبتسمين
فتأتي كل السماوات إلى غرفتي.
وانعكاسات لازوردية ترتعش على الجدران
وذكرى بيتنا تنير قلبي
عندما أعود مثقلاً بتجوالات الليل
والمرارة الأبدية للوحدة.”
― Yannis Ritsos, البعيد - مختارات شعرية شاملة

“And look, my brother, we learned to talk
very quietly and simply.
We understand each other now - there is no need for anything more.
And I say tomorrow we will become still simpler;
we’ll find those words that take on the same weight in all hearts, on all lips so that we can call figs figs, and a trough a trough, so that others will smile and say: ‘We’re making you a hundred poems an hour’. This is what we want too.
Because we do not sing to separate ourselves from people, my brother,
we sing to bring people together.”
― Yannis Ritsos, The Fourth Dimension

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
― Meister Eckhart