I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
Passion makes the best observations and the sorriest conclusions.
Jean Paul
The end we aim at must be known, before the way can be made.
The look of a king is itself a deed.
No rest is worth anything except the rest that is earned.
Cares are often more difficult to throw off than sorrows; the latter die with time, the former grow.
Strong character is brought out by change, weak ones by permanence.
In youth one has tears without grief, in old age grief without tears.
Variety in mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something s.
Brevity is the body and soul of wit.
Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.
Linus Pauling
Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
Cesare Pavese
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love -- any love -- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man --the one he used to be.
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
We don't remember days; we remember moments.
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest --thought, action --is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time -- is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.
Octavio Paz
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game.
Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he's going to vote against me.
Harry S Truman
Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.
When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.
A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.
It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.
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