Emily Bronte

The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

Molière

Je dis que l’on doit faire ainsi

Qu’au jeu de dés

Où s’il ne vous vient pas

Ce que vous demandez

Il faut jouer d’adresse, et,

D’une âme réduite

Corriger le hasard

Par la bonne conduite

Dostoyevski

Au contact des enfants l’âme s’assainit

Iris Murdock

"Quantum physics is the language of nature,” said Midge.

“Who says so”, said Thomas.

“I do.  I heard It on TV.  And the subatomic world needs us to rescue it from chaos.  It all sounds perfectly mad.  No wonder there are terrorists.  No wonder we need religion."

Lewis Carroll

Don’t let him know she liked them best

For this must ever be

A secret kept from all the rest

Between yourself and me

Alan Watts

In the western world it is second nature for us to assume that all creative action requires the incentive of inadequacy and discontent. It seems obvious that if we felt fulfilled at each instant and no longer regarded time as a path of pursuit, we should sit down in the sun, pull large Mexican hats over our eyes, and put bottles of tequila at our elbows. Even if this were true it might not be so great a disaster as we imagine, for there is no doubt that our extreme busyness is as much nervous fidgets as industry, and that a certain amount of ordinary laziness would lend our culture the pleasant mellowness it singularly lacks. However, it does not seem to occer to us that action goaded by a sense of inadequacy will be creative onlly in a limited sense. It will express the emptiness from which it springs rather than fullness, hunger rather than strength.

Flaubert

Il fréquenta le monde, et il eut d’autres amours encore.  Mais le souvenir continuel du premier les lui rendait insipides; et puis la véhémence du désir, la fleur même de la sensation était perdue.  Ses ambitions d’ésprit avaient également diminuées.  Des années passèrent ; et il supportait le désoeuvrement de son intelligence et l’inertie de son coeur.

Van Gogh

Art ...always seeking without absolutely finding.  As far as I know, that word means: I am seeking, I am striving, I am in with all my heart. It is just the contrary from saying, I know it, I have found it

Salmon Rushdie

Morality, judgement, character...it all starts with memory...and I am keeping carbons.

Lao Tzu

Man when living is soft and tender; when dead he is hard and tough. All animals and plants are tender and fragile; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and the tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life.

Alan Watts

To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not “all here” without reservation or regret.  Lacking self-acceptance we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity.  Apart from self-acceptance as the groundwork of thought and action, every attempt at spiritual or moral discipline is the fruitless struggle of a mind that is split asunder and insincere.  It is the freedom which is the essential basis of self-restraint.

Michael Ignatieff / Shakespeare

Lovers know what social scientists sometimes fail to understand:  everyone is an individual before and after he or she is a member of a race, a class, or a profession, and that these differences, so tiny that they can only be seen in the minute mutual scrutiny of a bedroom are the source of the identity that is primary for a person… In love we want to banish father and mother as fully as we can, if only to banish the Oedipal taboos that linger and bleach away desire.

… it becomes an essential activity of the intelligence to safeguard the meaning of the romantic tradition (the integrity of love poetry, for example) so that our children can still grow up hearing the dream speaking from its source, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31, with its sublimely wise vision of love based not on flight from the shades of the past but on finding a home for the past in the loves of the present:

Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone
Who all their parts of me to thee did give
That due of many now is thine alone.
Their images I loved I view in thee
And thou, all they, has all the all of me

Oscar Wilde

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Oscar Wilde

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

Mario Vargas Llosa

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Marguerite Yourcenar

certains voeux avaient été repoussés, d’autres exaucés au contraire, car le malheur est que, parfois, des souhaits s’accomplissent, afin que se perpetue le supplice de l’espérance.

William Blake

In seed time learn, in harvest teach,
in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plow
over the bones of the dead

The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid
courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not
breeds pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the p low

Dip him in the river who loves water.

A fool sees not the same tree
that a wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light,
shall never become a star.

Eternity is in love
with the productions of time.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock;
but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

All wholesome food is caught
without a net or a trap.

Bring out number, weight and measure
in a year of dearth.

No bird soars too high if he soars
with his own wings.

A dead body revenges not injuries.

The most sublime act is to set
another before you.

If the fool would persist in his
folly, he would become wise.

Folly is the cloke of knavery.

Shame is Pride’s cloke.

Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.

The pride of the peacock is
the glory of God.

The wrath of the lion is the
wisdom of god.

The nakedness of woman is the
work of God.

Excess of sorrow laughs
excess of joy weeps.

The roaring of lions, the howling of
wolves, the raging of the stormy
sea, and the destructive sward,
are portions of eternity, too great
for the eye of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself

Joys impregnate, Sorrows bring forth,

Let man wear the fell of the lion,
woman the fleece of the sheep.

The bird a nest, the spider a web,
man friendship

George Orwell

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning clear as one can through pictures or sensations.

André Gide

Tout au contraire de nous, Albert, non tant en moraliste qu’en romantique et de cette génération qui se reconnaissait en Rolla, ne consentait à considérer la volupté que comme une récompense de l’amour, et tenait le simple plaisir en mépris. Pour moi j’ai dit déjà combien l’événément à la fois et la pente de ma nature m’invitait à dissocier l’amour du désir

André Gide

chaque respect, dis-je, comportant un aveuglement, c’est seulement en s’affranchissant de ceux-ci que l’homme pouvait espérer de progresser vers la lumière.

e.e. cummings

Since feeling is first
Who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
Wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
Lady I swear by all flower. Don’t cry
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids flutter which ways
We are for each other – than laugh
lean back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.

André Gide

On a peur de se trouver seul ! on ne se trouve pas du tout.  Cette agoraphobie morale m’est odieuse; c’est la pire des lâchetés. Pourtant c’est toujours seul qu’on invente. Mais qui cherche ici d’inventer ? Ce que l’on sent en soi de différent, c’est précisément ce que l’on possède de rare, ce qui fait à chacun sa valeur ; et c’est là ce que l’on tâche de supprimer. On imite.  Et l’on prétend aimer la vie.

Milan Kundera

le temps épéronné par la jalousie passe à une allure incroyable. La jalousie occupe l’esprit encore plus complètement qu’un travail intellectuel passioné. L’esprit n’a plus une seconde de loisir. Celui qui est en proie à la jalousie ignore l’ennui. 

William Blake

I Dreamt a Dream! What can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen

Guarded by an angel mild:

Witless woe was ne’er beguil’d!

 

And I wept both night and day

And he wip’d my tears away

And I wept both day and night

And hid from him my heart’s delight

 

So he took his wings and fled;

Then the morn blush’d rosy red;

I dried my tears and armed my fears

With ten thousand shields and spears.

 

Soon my Angel came again:

I was armed, he came in vain;

For the time of youth was fled,

And grey hairs were on my head

Milan Kundera

Freedom does not begin when parents are rejected or buried; freedom dies when parents are born.

Milan Kundera

Alexandre Dubcek, après avoir été arrêté par l’armée russe, kidnappé, emprisonné, menacé, contraint de négocier avec Brejnev, rentre à Prague. Il parle à la radio, mais il ne peut parler, il cherche son souffle, il fait au milieu des phrases de longues pauses atroces. Ce que révèle pour moi cet épisode historique (d’ailleurs complétement oublié car, deux heures après, les techniciens de la radio ont été obligés de couper les pénibles pauses de son discours), c’est la faiblesse. La faiblesse comme catégorie très générale de l’existence : « on est toujours faible confronté à une force supérieure ; même quand on a le corps d’athlète de Dubcek. » Tereza ne peut supporter le spectacle de cette faiblesse qui lui répugne et l’humilie et elle préfère émigrer.  Mais face aux infidélités de Thomas, elle est comme Dubcek en face de Brejnev : désarmée et faible.  Et vous savez déjà ce qu’est le vertige : c’est être ivre de sa propre faiblesse, c’est le désir insurmontable de tomber.  Tereza subitement comprend qu’ « elle fait partie des faibles, du camp des faibles, du pays des faibles et qu’elle doit leur être fidèle justement parce qu’ils sont faibles et qu’ils cherchent leur souffle au milieu des phrases. » Et, ivre de sa faiblesse, elle quitte Tomas et revient à Prague, dans la « villes des faibles ».  La situation historique n’est pas ici un arrière-plan, un décor devant lequel les situations humaines se déroulent, mais est en elle-même une situation humaine, une situation existentielle en agrandissement.

-l'Art du roman

Milan Kundera

La tendresse prend naissance à l’instant où nous sommes rejetés sur le seuil de l’âge adulte et où nous nous rendons comte avec angoisse des avantages de l’enfance que nous ne comprenions pas quand nous étions enfants.

 

La tendresse, c’est créer un espace artificiel où l’autre doit être traité comme un enfant.

Proust

Il faudrait choisir de cesser de souffrir ou de cesser d’aimer. Car, ainsi qu’au début il est formé par le désir, l’amour n’est entretenu plus tard que par l’anxieté douloureuse.  Je sentais qu’une partie de la vie d’Albertine m’echappait. L’amour, dans l’anxieté douloureuse comme dans le désir heureux, est l’exigence d’un tout. Il ne naît, il ne subsiste que si une partie reste à conquérir. On n’aime que ce qu’on ne possède pas tout entier.

Eudora Welty

But he wanted to leap up, so say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am.  Is it too late?  My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and you may have heard it, protesting against emptiness… It should be full, he would rush on to tell her, thinking of his heart now as a deep lake, it should be holding love like other hearts.  It should be flooded with love.  There would be a warm Spring day… Come and stand in my heart, whoever you are, and a whole river would cover your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirlpools, and draw you down to yourself, your whole body, your heart too.

Durkheim

Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible arise within him.

Henry James

He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy – to call worthy – of the personal relation; never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed.  He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humorously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare insidiously the cup.  These were services that by all romantic tradition were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate.  But he could amuse himself with saying – so far as the amusement went – that they were what he had once for all turned his back on.