Some
of my (currently) favourite quotations.
(Use the link in the left
column to send me
your favourite quotes.)
We
may affirm absolutely that nothing great in
the world has been accomplished without passion.
~
Georg Hegel
Life
is like playing the solo violin in public
and learning the instrument as one goes on.
~ Samuel
Becket
There
are several occasions in the course of any woman's day when, without
question, screaming is the appropriate response ...
~
Sarah Ban Breathnach
If
life was meant to be easy everyone would have one.
~
Russell Cawthorne
You
see? It is like I have always said: "You can get more with a kind
word and a length of two-by-four than you can with just a kind
word".
~
Sam Spade
Most
people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
~
Abraham Lincoln
Nothing
is more difficult, in my opinion, than to avoid something
that fundamentally attracts you.
~ Catherine the Great
‘Tis
what I love determines how I love.
~ George Eliot
Love,
if love be perfect, casts out fear
~
Tennyson
Being
entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
~
Sigmund Freud
Man
is not a creature of circumstances.
Circumstances are the creatures of men.
~
Disraeli
Freedom
is not the right to be virtuous, it is the right to do as one
pleases…limited only when one person’s exercise of it endangers the
freedom of others, or when it results in overt actions that society
deems destructive of its own purposes.
~
Robert W. Haney
In
friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures.
~
Kahlil Gibran
The
permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality.
The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to
reality.
~
James Michener
The
best way to know life is to love many things.
~
Vincent Van Gogh
Be
glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to
play and to look up at the stars.
~
Henry Van Dyke
I
have peace offerings with me, this day have I payed my vows. Therefore
came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found
thee.
I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with
fine linen of Egypt. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes and
cinnamon.
Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning, let us solace
ourselves with loves.
~ Proverbs
Chapter 7 Verse 14-18
Everyone
has talent.
What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places
where it leads.
~ Erica
Jong
For
the world is wondrous large
Seven seas from marge to marge
And the wildest dreams of Kew
Are the facts of Kathmandu.
~
Kipling
The
first draft of anything is shit.
~
Ernest Hemingway
(Hemingway is also quoted
as saying
that he wrote all his work by hand in
in pencil and never changed a word.)
Many
people hear voices when no one is there.
Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at
the walls all day.
Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
~
Meg Chittenden
Pleasure
without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness.
~
Alan Jay Lerner
That
is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated
after death,
but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when
I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics,
the poets, the lovers, a sense
of communion with the universe.
~
Anais Nin
After
ecstasy, the laundry.
~
"Zen" saying
I
like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
~
Noel Coward
Out
of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric.
Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
~
William Butler Yeats
Criticism?
An artist wants praise. Praise.
~
Virginia Woolf
So,
fall asleep love, loved by me…for I know love, I am loved by thee
~
Robert Browning
If
we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,
we don’t believe in it at all.
~
Noah Chomsky
It
is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason
as to administer medication to the dead.
~
Thomas Jefferson
Only
those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
~
T.S. Eliot
It
takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
~
e.e. cummings
Love
is not the dying moan of a distant violin — it’s the triumphant
twang of a bedspring.
~
S.J. Perelman
We
are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
~
Lawrence Durrell
Ah!
The misery of harbours and the names they conjure when you are going
nowhere~.
~
Lawrence Durrell
Prohibitions
create the desire they were intended to cure.
~
Lawrence Durrell
It’s
hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp when you are up to
your ass in alligators.
~
unknown
(Originated during
Viet-Nam war)
You
will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
~
Colette
Beware
the man who denounces women writers; his penis is tiny.
~
Erica Jong
To
avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
~
Elbert Hubbard
The
purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
~
Octavio Paz
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