Authors

“Humankind, fleet of life like tree leaves, unsubstantial as shadows, weak creatures of clay, wingless, ephemeral, sorrow worn, and dreamlike.”

“Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable. ”

“Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”

“The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering.”

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings…if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.”

“The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.”

“Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

“It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”

“Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted.”

“Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.”

“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

“If a mute kid swears, should his mother wash his hands with soap?”

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”

“It’s better to be kind than to be right.”

“There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.”

“The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.”

“There are only three failures: not believing, not trying and not going all the way.”

“Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.”

“Never fall in love with someone that won’t fight for you because when the real battles begin they won’t pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.”

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.