ThursdayJan 08, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!'
The function of art is to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Every individual is representative of the whole ... and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life.... To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one's life as possible is right to me.
It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Dreams are necessary to life.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
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