Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!