Nora > Nora's Quotes

“The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“There is peace even in the storm”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.”
― Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring

“Those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well.... Love is the best and noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be.

If only one keeps loving faithfully what is truly worth loving and does not squander one's love on trivial and insignificant and meaningless things then one will gradually obtain more light and grow stronger.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone.”
― Larry Brown

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Then I remembered that night is the fairies’ day, and the moon their sun; and I thought—Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Hours later there came a change. It began to grow light in the bus. The greyness outside the
windows turned from mud-colour to mother of pearl, then to faintest blue, then to a bright blueness that stung the eyes. We seemed to be floating in a pure vacancy. There were no lands, no sun, no stars in sight: only the radiant abyss.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“The sadness will last forever.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Someday death will take us to another star.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“The sunflower is mine, in a way.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend,
Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.


-from "The Sad Shepherd”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“All this time we sat without speaking. I was considering how to begin. It was twilight in the room, a black storm−cloud was coming over the sky, and there came again a rumble of thunder in the distance.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Humiliated

“How much of human life is lost in waiting.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“VIII

O when so much has been and gone
behind you—grief, to say the least—
expect no help from anyone.
Board a train, get to the coast.
It’s wider and it’s deeper. This
superiority’s not a thing
of joy especially. Mind you, if
one has to feel as orphans do,
better in places where the view
stirs somehow and cannot sting.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English

“I rode to meet you: dreams
like living beings swarmed around me
and the moon on my right side
followed me, burning.

I rode back: everything changed.
My soul in love was sad
and the moon on my left side
trailed me without hope.

To such endless impressions
we poets give ourselves absolutely,
making, in silence, omen of mere event,
until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.”
― Franz Kafka

“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”
― Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart