Quote collection
164 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Three kinds of souls, three prayers: 1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot. 2) Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. 3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break."
"Everything in this world has a hidden meaning, I thought. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics; woe to anyone who begins to decipher them and guess what they mean.... When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years later, too late, that you understand."
"In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls."
"Everything in this world has a hidden meaning."
"When an almond tree became covered with blossoms in the heart of winter, all the trees around it began to jeer. 'What vanity,' they screamed, 'what insolence! Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!' The flowers of the almond tree blushed for shame. 'Forgive me, my sisters,' said the tree. 'I swear I did not want to blossom, but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart."
"How simple and frugal a thing is happiness."
"God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises."
"To succeed, you must first believe you can."
"Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction."
"What is truth? What is falsehood? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts up a man's height above the earth - that's true. Whatever clips off man's wings - that's false."
"You can knock on a deaf man's door forever."
"Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels."
"This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale."
"There is no harsher means of punishment, than to answer malice with kindness."
"It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite."
"The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love."
"All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows."
"As long as there are flowers and children and birds in the world, have no fears: everything will be fine."
"The more devils we have within us, the more chance we have to form angels."
"Truly, everything in this world depended on time. Time ripened all. If you had time, you succeeded in working the human mud internally and turning it into spirit. Then you did not fear death. If you did not have time, you perished."