Camille > Camille's Quotes

“If not you, then who? If not now, when?”
― Hillel first- century Jewish scholar

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“أدمنت احزاني
فصرت اخاف ان لا احزنا
I got addicted to my sorrows,
Until I have gotten scared of not being sorrowed.

وطعنت آلافا من المرات
حتى صار يوجعني بان لا اطعنا
And I was stabbed thousands of times,
Until it felt painful not to be stabbed.

ولعنت في كل اللغات
حتى صار يقلقني بان لا العنا
And I was cursed in all the languages,
Until I started being nervous of not being cursed.

ولقد تشابهت كل البلاد
فلا ارى نفسي هناك، ولا ارى نفسي هنا
And all the countries seemed the same,
That I don't see myself there, And I don't see myself here.”
― Nizar Qabbani

“At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“I am from there. I am from here.
I am not there and I am not here.
I have two names, which meet and part,
and I have two languages.
I forget which of them I dream in.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.”
― Maya Angelou, Conversations with Maya Angelou (Literary Conversations

“The wolves prey upon the lambs in the darkness of the night, but the blood stains remain upon the stones in the valley until the dawn comes, and the sun reveals the crime to all.”
― Kahlil Gibran, Secrets of the Heart

“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts.”
― Dario Fo

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
― Sophie Scholl

“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face--there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain from our lusts; but on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we are able to restrain them.”
― Benedict de Spinoza

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
― Spinoza

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”
― Baruch De Spinoza, Ethics

“In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth - he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child’s love.

Now, of course, it’s too late –
you were trapped in the romance of fidelity.
You kept going back, clinging
to two people you hardly recognized
after what they’d endured.

If once you could have saved yourself,
now that time’s past: you were obstinate, pathetically
blind to change. Now you have nothing:
for you, home is a cemetery.
I’ve seen you press your face against the granite markers –
you are the lichen, trying to grow there.
But you will not grow,
you will not let yourself
obliterate anything.”
― Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles

“I am a citizen of the world.”
― Diogenes of Sinope, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”
― Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

“Darkness overswept the land and on the sea the night floated strapped to a slab of wood”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“The world
was whole because
it shattered. When it shattered,
then we knew what it was.”
― Louise Glück, Vita Nova: Winner of the Nobel Prize

“Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in succession of shelters.”
― Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012

“There, in the spaces between darkness and light, a sadness hangs in the air, invisible to the human eye yet heavy on the heart.”
― Aline Ohanesian, Orhan's Inheritance

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,” by which he meant that where and how our caretakers were stuck in their development becomes an internal paradigm for us also to be stuck. Frequently we find ourselves dealing with a parent’s unresolved issues. At times we may replicate the patterns of our ancestors, or we may rebel and attempt to do the opposite. Interestingly, antagonism to the influences of parents binds just as tightly as compliance. Either way, antecedents confine and limit us. Perhaps this fact is behind the ancient biblical admonition that the sins of a man shall be visited “upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” We”
― Robert A. Johnson, Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life

“Love as a verb. Love as a commitment. ”
― Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With

“Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity