“A loving heart is the truest wisdom”
Charles Dickens
„Fii de folos oamenilor. Rețeta fără greș pentru fericire și reușită este aceea de a dori binele celorlalți”
Desmond Tutu
“Gandeste-te la toate lucrurile frumoase de langa tine si fii fericit”
Anne Frank
“The world is not here to make you happy, it is here to make you conscious”
Eckhart Tolle
“If beauty and love do not suit the times then you have to be beautiful and to love to spite the times”
“You have to arrive at unbelief yourself and Russian get their unbelief for free therefore they don’t value it, they value faith”
Mikhail Shishkin
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.”
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
“If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.”
“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”
“Nowadays people seem to look on life as a speculation. It is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice.”
“What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art it is one’s last mood.”
“Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not.”
“You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.”
“It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a
personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never have.”
“We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.”
“Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.”
“Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-like than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.”
“Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others for that.”
“Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.”
“Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is
an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property.”
Oscar Wilde
„Pentru a trăi împreună oamenii trebuie să evite nevoia excesivă de certitudine. Religia este extrem de valoroasă și este un formator de civilizație, dar unii oameni se implică în religie pentru că au o mare dorință de certitudine. Iar această certitudine îi face atât de siguri de sine încât ajung să aibă o atitudine negativă față de alți oameni. Ori credința este un lucru pozitiv. Nu implică negativitate față de oameni.”
Garret FitzGerald
“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action; and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Tot ce trebuie să faci este să trăieşti (…) Continuă să aduni experienţe una câte una ca pe cărămizi. De exemplu, iubeşte serios pe cineva. Tot ce am avut nevoie a fost timpul şi experienţa ca să mă identific pe mine. Nu trebuie să fie o experienţă specială. Nu contează dacă e o serie de experienţe banale. Dar trebuie să fie experienţe care să pătrundă adânc în corpul meu.”
Haruki Murakami
“Be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves”
Rainer Maria Rilke
„Dacă vei avea iubire pentru toate, vei cuprinde și taina divină care se află în toate. Pentru că atunci putința ta de a desluși adevărul va crește necontenit, iar mintea ta se va deschide către o iubire atotcuprinzătoare”.
(“If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love.”)
“Un om este nefericit pentru ca nu stie ca este fericit. Acesta este singurul motiv”
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
“Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.”
Dostoievski
“Language has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”
Paul Tillich
“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. Stop scaring yourself with impetuous notions, with your reactive impressions of the way things are!”
Epictetus
“Truth is power, but only when one has patience and requires of it no immediate effect. And one must have no specific aims. Somehow, lack of an agenda is the greatest power. Sometimes it is better not to think in terms of plans; here, months and years may mean nothing. Truth must be sought for its own sake, its holy, divine greatness.”
“Melancolia este nelinistea pe care o provoaca la om proximitatea eternului”
-Romano Guardini
“Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.”
Paul Auster
“Daca vrei sa construiesti un vapor, sa nu incepi prin a-i trimite pe oameni dupa lemne, cuie, unelte, sfori si alte materiale. Invata-i intai sa tanjeasca dupa marea indepartata, nesfarsita.”
Antoine de Saint Exupery
“You look ridiculous if you dance, you look ridiculous if you don’t dance, so you might as well dance.”
Gertrude Stein
After all, a woman who doesn’t love cats is never going to make a man happy.”
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
“Cel care nu stie nimic nu poate sa iubeasca nimic. Cel care nu face nimic nu poate sa inteleaga nimic. Cel care nu intelege nimic nu este de luat in consideratie. Doar cel ce intelege, vede si studiaza. Cunoștințele cele mai de pret sunt legate de dragostea fata de om… cine crede ca toate fructele matureaza deodata ca si capsunile, nu a inteles nimic despre natura strugurilor.”
Paracelsus
‘If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.’
Montaigne
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear”
“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from”
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
-Joan Didion
“For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great”
“A fi surprins, a te mira – înseamnă să începi să înţelegi.”
“Libertatea spiritului, adică puterea intelectului, se măsoară prin capacitatea de a disocia ideile tradiţional inseparabile”
“În fiecare lucru există un indiciu al unei posibile plenitudini. ”
-José Ortega y Gasset
“Nu te ruga sa intelegi. S-ar putea sa ti se intample”
Meg Gardiner
“Fericirea este o recompensa data celui care nu a cautat-o”
Anton Cehov
“Cand suntem iubiti nu ne indoim de nimic. Cand iubim ne indoim de orice.”
Louis Ferdinand Celine
“Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price”
“Jumatate din distractia calatoriei este estetica ratacirii”
-Ray Bradbury
“Junatate din raul facut pe aceasta lume se datoreaza oamenilor care vor sa se simta importanti”
George Eliot
“Omul trebuie sa aiba curajul propriului pesimism”
Ian McEwan
“Barca dragostei s-a sfaramat de viata obisnuita”
Vladimir Maiakosvki
“Mandria distruge posibilitatea iubirii, a fericirii si chiar a bunului simt”
C.S. Lewis
“Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start – the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless”
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come”
-Victor Hugo
“Toti suntem nemuritori, dar trebuie sa murim intai”
Mircea Eliade
“La 50 de ani fiecare are fata pe care o merita”
George Orwell
“Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy?
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’d guess your method works quite well.”
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
-Haruki Murakami
“Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.”
“All great deed and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning”
“It teaches that a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attituds of mind they assume.”
“L’absurde, c’est la raison lucide qui constate ses limites.”
“Ceea ce conteaza nu este ce se spune, ci ceea ce nu trebuie spus”
-Albert Camus
Limitele ratiunii noastre pot fi extinse oricand, prin revelatie.
Absurdul nu este absurd decat in raport cu mintea noastra, nu in raport cu Adevarul.
Sensul exista intotdeauna, chiar daca este (inca) nedezvaluit sau neaccesat de noi.
“It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.”
“As we judge others so are we judged by others. The suspicious will always be tormented by suspicion.”
“It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.”
-Nelson Mandela
“Nu poti pleca din tine insuti”
Ionel Teodoreanu
“Momentele nu vin niciodata tarziu sau devreme. Vin cand le bate ceasul. Al lor, nu al nostru.”
Jose Saramago
„Când iei viața peste picior, îți pune piedici.”
Tudor Mușatescu
“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart”
Goethe
“Omul cu adevarat bun este cel care ar fi putut sa fie rau si nu a fost”
Nicolae Iorga
“Am inteles ca un om poate avea totul neavand nimic si nimic avand totul.”
Mihai Eminescu
“I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.”
Carl Gustav Jung
“Este important sa cunoastem lumea pentru a ne gasi locul si rostul in ea.”
Brad Florescu
“Numai cine nu poate să iubească, îmbătrânește și moare.”
George Calinescu
“Comedia înseamnă cunoaștere și drama înseamnă necunoaștere. Dacă am cunoaște nu am mai avea cum să fim îndurerați.”
“Umorul este foarte elevat. Băşcălia este la îndemâna oricui.”
-Marin Moraru
“Să ne facem cu toţii datoria şi lumea îşi va recăpăta sensul ei suprem”
George Enescu
“Titlurile il disting pe omul mediocru, il jeneaza pe cel superior si sunt batjocorite de cel inferior.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Fericirea este zilnică, asemenea luminii.”
Adrian Pintea
“Spiritual intelligence is recognizing purpose”
John Mackey
„Dacă nu poți face față posibilității de a pierde, ajungi să-ți trăiești viața ascunzându-te.”
Meg Gardiner
“Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking….I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born.”
“Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born.”
“All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can’t get it out.”
“There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.”
-Mark Twain
“The purpose of human experience is to wake up who we really are and manifest love”
John MacKey
“What I really want to do is be a representative of the human race. I have a chance to show how kind we can be, how intelligent and generous we can be, I have a chance to love and to laugh.”
Maya Angelou
“Nu face rau si raul va inceta sa existe.”
Tolstoi
“Nu pierdeti timpul cautand obstacole. S-ar putea sa nu existe.”
Franz Kafka
“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
Virginia Woolf
“God made Truth with many doors to welcome every believer who knocks on them.”
Khalil Gibran
“O tara de oi merita un guvern de lupi.”
Edward R. Murrow
“Cand un munte arde toata lumea stie. Dar cand inima arde cine stie?”
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
“Nimic nu se poate naște decât dintr-o relație. Teatrul însuși este tocmai această relație dintre actor și public.”
Mariana Mihut
“Liniștea nu este într-un loc, ci într-un mod de a fi.”
Hrisostom Filipescu
“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”
Mikhail Baryshnikov
“The secret to finding our passion is that we bring passion in everything that we do”
Marie Forleo
“Ca sa fii adevarat, insa, trebuie sa fii foarte sincer si foarte simplu.”
Tamara Buciuceanu
“Strazile cu soare sunt cele pe care nimeresti cand te inchei la sireturi si uiti sa mai privesti spre cer, strazile cu intersectii sunt cele pe care te trezesti cand esti prea sigur pe tine, iar strazile spre plus infinit sunt doar pentru matematicienii care-ti vand formule ale optimismului.”
Ramona Iacobute
“Dupa multi ani omul poate simula multe lucruri. Dar nu si fericirea.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“Să fii sensibil la cel de lângă tine cere un antrenament special”
Andrei Serban
“The true genius shudders at incompleteness, imperfection, and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Nimeni n-a ajuns intelept din intamplare.”
Seneca
“Cred că tineretea și frumusețea se datorează bunei dispoziţii, bunei digestii şi interesului faţă de semeni”
Regina Maria
“Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.”
Nikolai Gogol
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow ; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief, and heals them. For this reason the moral nature of man is more active than the physical.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Niciodată să nu distrugi cu vorbele ce ai creat cu liniştea.”
Charles Bukowski
“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets. For it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
Ludwig van Beethoven
“Sa lasam femeile frumoase barbatilor fara imaginatie”
Marcel Proust
“Dar trecând peste toate astea, tu şi eu avem tot ce ne trebuie pentru a fi fericiţi: nişte buze şi un zâmbet.”
Anamaria Prisacariu
“Fiecare dispune de sine: nimeni nu poate fi deposedat de sine însuşi.”
Giovanni Papini
“You’re going to miss this someday. So how about not missing it while it is happening?”
Dani Shapiro
“Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.”
Vincent van Gogh
C’est exactement ça qu’est la littérature: d’habiles mensonges qui, secrètement, disent la vérité.
Simone de Beauvoir
“Ceea ce este admirabil la fericirea altora este ca e credibila”
Marcel Proust
“I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.”
Haruki Murakami
“Probabilitatea ca un anumit individ să fie imbecil este independentă de orice altă însușire a respectivei persoane”
Carlo M. Cipolla
“Oamenii politici ai Antichitatii se inconjurau adesea de filosofi; cei de azi prefera anturajul ziaristilor”
Emil Cioran
“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“As it is so strangely ordained in this world, what is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind… Why is it that even in moments of unthinking, careless gaiety a different and strange mood comes upon one?”
Nikolai Gogol
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
Khalil Gibran
“Dacă ai în faţă oameni inteligenţi nu reuşeşti, de cele mai multe ori, să laşi o punte a inteligenţei spre comuniere. Dacă ai în faţă cretini, la ce bun să faci eforturi?”
Jeni Acterian
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf
“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.”
Kahlil Gibran
“Rămâi în singurătate atunci când numai trecutul pledează pentru tine. După gloria carierei, doar zgomotul aripilor târâte, pentru că prea mari crescute şi prea grele, inutile, de folos doar cu umbra, cum se zice că răsare sub ştreang mandragora când face dragoste spânzuratul.”
Claudiu Soare – Jurnal ingrat
“Nu suntem altceva decat rezultatul curiozitatii lui Dumnezeu despre Sine.”
Thomas Mann
“You recognize your insignificance?…Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men. Among men you must be conscious of your dignity. Don’t confound “being humble” with “recognizing one’s worthlessness.”
Anton Chekhov
“The moment you notice the slightest trace of stupidity in someone’s laughter, it undoubtedly means that the man is of limited intelligence, though he may do nothing but pour out ideas. Or if his laughter isn’t stupid, but the man himself, when he laughs, for some reason suddenly seems ridiculous to you, even just slightly—know, then, that the man has no real sense of dignity, not fully in any case. Or finally, if his laughter is infectious, but for some reason still seems banal to you, know, then, that the man’s nature is on the banal side as well, and all the noble and lofty that you noticed in him before is either deliberately affected or unconsciously borrowed, and later on the man is certain to change for the worse, to take up what’s ‘useful’ and throw his noble ideas away without regret, as the errors and infatuations of youth.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent
“Nu judecati oamenii dupa cei cu care se aduna. Nu uitati ca Iuda avea amici ireprosabili.”
Ernest Hemingway
“mă plictisesc, de fapt, în plină evoluție
și privesc rîul
fără să mă lege nimic de lumea asta
și de inerția ei pe care o simt mereu,
mereu ca pe o noutate.”
Stefan Baghiu
“Very little is needed to make a happy life”
Marcus Aurelius”
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
Lev Tolstoy
„Glumeţii se dovedesc adesea profeţi.”
William Shakespeare
„Dacă doar auziţi adevărul, fără să-l trăiţi, atunci viaţa voastră va fi plină de confuzii lamentabile.”
“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
-Krishnamurti
“De când m-ai părăsit mă fac tot mai frumoasă
ca hoitul luminând în întuneric.
Nu mi se mai observă fragila mea carcasă,
nici ochiul devenit mai fix şi sferic,
nici zdreanţa mâinilor pe obiecte,
nici mersul, inutil desfigurat de jind,
– ci doar cruzimea ta pe tâmplele-mi perfecte,
ca nimbul putregaiului sclipind”.
Nina Cassian
“This ship is going by a mighty engine and you are busy rowing”
Mooji
“Exista oameni care, manati de dorinta de a cunoaste totul, uita sa iubeasca.”
Stendhal
“Purity of soul and impurity of body can go together”
Vincent van Gogh
“In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”
Kazuo Ishiguro
“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.”
Mark Twain
“Be. Don’t try to become”
Osho
How do we change the world? One random act of kindness at a time”
Morgan Freeman
“I’ll start with small things”
Vincent van Gogh
“In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people.”
Nelson Mandela
“One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men.”
Oscar Wilde
“Since I’m a novelist I’m the opposite of you – I believe that what’s most important is what cannot be measured. I’m not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people’s lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.”
Haruki Murakami
“Daca n-ar fi iubirea, m-as teme de viata”
Grigore Vieru
“The effort to strive for truth has to precede all other efforts.”
Albert Einstein
“You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.”
Haruki Murakami
“Facts are the enemy of truth”
Miguel de Cervantes
“It is true: we love life not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Love is misunderstood to be an emotion; actually, it is a state of awareness, a way of being in the world, a way of seeing oneself and others”.
Dr. David Hawkins
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Rumi
“Love is not mere sentiment. but the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe.”
Deepak Chopra
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
Rumi
“Omul care are intotdeauna dreptate este dur, iar cel care este mereu intelept este trist.”
Voltaire
“You’re only given one little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”
Robin Williams
“Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.”
Simone Weil
“Angoasa este dispozitia fundamentala care ne pune in fata neantului”
Heidegger
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed by the masses.”
Plato
“Nefiind o armonie între mine și timp, întotdeauna a fost greu. Acum, spre bătrânețe s-a mai regăsit ceva din această armonie și mă mai cioplesc pe ultima sută de metri. Cred că nu am exploatat și n-am stors toată bogăția pe care mi-a dat-o Dumnezeu. Din cauza nerăbdării, am fugit de multe ori paralel cu mine.”
Coca Bloos
“Şi cel mai sălbatic animal se îndoaie la dragoste”
Szoby Cseh
“Cum să te bucuri de lume dacă nu-ți găsești refugiu în ea?”
“Există întrebări peste care nu am putea trece dacă eliberarea de ele nu ne-ar fi inculcată în propria natură.”
“Aceia care păstrează capacitatea de a aduna frumusețea nu vor îmbătrâni niciodată.”
-Franz Kafka
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
Epictetus
“When no one else shares your level of passion you are where you belong”
Placido Domingo
“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
Maya Angelou
“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
Tolstoy
“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.”
Oscar Wilde
“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.”
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
Stephen Fry
”Fizionomia femeilor nu incepe decat la treizeci de ani.
Pana la aceasta varsta, pictorul nu gaseste in chipurile lor decat culori trandafirii si albe, surasuri si expresii care repeta un acelasi gand, gandul tineretii si al iubirii, gand uniform si fara profunzime; la batranete insa, totul a vorbit in fiinta femeii, pasiunile s-au incrustat pe chipul sau, expresiile cele mai violente, de bucurie si de durere, in cele din urma i-au schimonosit si i-au pocit trasaturile, i s-au intiparit in mii de riduri, care toate au un limbaj, iar un cap de femeie devine atunci sublim prin groaza lui, frumos prin melancolia lui si magnific prin linistea sa.”
Balzac
“Cinismul nu e valabil decât în cazul omului foarte inteligent, iar acela nu umbla cu astfel de prostii, sa se facă strașnic prin duritate, prin lipsa de sentimente, prin lăudaroșenie și prin vanitate.”
Numai literatura e o realitate efectivă, care poate să fortifice o minte, un caracter și un spirit. Nu cred deloc în aptitudinile de justiție, corectitudine și creație ale omului care disprețuieşte literatura. Pentru mine e nul.”
-Alexandru Paleologu
“The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.”
Andrew Solomon
“Be awake enough to see where you are at any given time and how that is beautiful and has poetry inside.”
Jeff Buckley
“It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.”
Anaïs Nin
“Being alone in our present society raises an important question about identity and well-being.”
Sara Maitland
“Of course we also live in a world of great beauty, sacrificial and passionate love, tenderness, prosperity, courage and joy. But quite a lot of all that seems to happen regardless of the paradigm and the high thoughts of philosophy. It has always happened. It is precisely because it has always happened that we go on wrestling with these issues in the hope that it can happen more often and for more people.”
Sara Maitland
“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.”
Martha Nussbaum
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
Anaïs Nin
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
Lao Tzu
“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is”.
Baruch Spinoza
” What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.”
Picasso
“Am reusit sa parasesc strada, dar strada nu m-a parasit niciodata”
Guillermo Ariaga
“(…) asistam de câteva milenii la moartea clinica a iubirii si ca, tot de atunci, toata lumea a înnebunit, fiecare se culca cu fiecare dar se iubeste singur. . . singura constanta, singurul punct comun al pseudoiubirii omenesti la ora actuala, zamislit si sustinut cu perfidie pentru-contra de o întreaga politie spirituala, este credinta ca iubirea nu poate sa aduca, pâna la urma, decât nenorocire […] E drept, mai recunoaste si câteva exceptii, le numeri pe degete, câte o pereche, ici-colo, la câteva milioane de oameni, le plângi de mila daca îi compari. Niste amarâti, vai de mama lor, traiesc retrasi prin cine stie ce coclauri, fac dragoste acolo, în colibe, pâna îi viziteaza zeii. Atunci devin copaci, cu atâta se aleg… Pe astia îi considera alesii, pastratorii dragostei pe lume”
Gellu Naum
“The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure.”
Oscar Wilde
“No matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.”
Sylvia Plath
“To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know … widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”
Pablo Neruda
“If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
John Steinbeck
“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Elliot
“So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.”
Diane Ackerman
„Spiritul are nevoie de un limbaj pentru a-și făuri manifestările.”
„Trebuie să crezi într-un înțeles al vieții reînnoit (de teatru) și în care omul neînfricat pune stăpânire pe ceea ce nu este încă și-i determină nașterea. Și tot ceea ce nu este născut mai poate să se nască, dacă nu ne-am mulțumi să rămânem simple organe de înregistrare.”
-Antonin Artaud
“Starile frumoase, de o „clipa” – indiferent ca ea dureaza o ora sau trei zile – sunt efemere fara Dumnezeu.”
“Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search… for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.”
-Italo Calvino
“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”
Shankar Vedantam
„Leisure … is not the privilege of those who can afford to take time; it is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take.”
David Steindl-Rast
„The great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed.”
What is drawing? How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? — since hammering on it doesn’t help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.”
-Vincent van Gogh
“Aging is a staircase — the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There’s only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards”
Jane Fonda
„Image is powerful, but also image is superficial. There’s very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives.
So today, for me, being fearless means being honest.”
-Cameron Russel
„I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. (…) The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“The challenge is not to be perfect…it’s to be whole”
Jane Fonda
„Acceptă-te pe tine ca să poţi să ai acces la toată fiinţa ta.”
Ana Pasti
“There is only one thing worse than injustice, and that is justice without her sword in her hand. When right is not might it is evil.”
Oscar Wilde
„Cel mai important lucru pe lume nu este să ai ci să dai. Căci cea mai grozavă formă de luptă nu este pentru a avea ci pentru a da.”
Leopoldina Bălănuță
“We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.”
Gloria Steinem
“A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of―that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.”
Haruki Murakami – Kafka on the Shore
„Supunere oarbă în faţa unei duble dictaturi: dictatura vitezei către nicăieri şi dictatura transparenţei spre gol, spre nimic, spre vid. Viteza distruge conţinutul, iar transparenţa spulberă profunzimea. Transparenţa nu este adevăr tot aşa cum viteza nu este fapt trăit.”
„Cândva, gândind de la nimic la ceva, omul începea să creeze. Astăzi, omul, gândind de la ceva la nimic, se anulează.”
-Valentin Nicolau
„Astăzi responsabilitatea nu-și mai are centrul de greutate în oameni, ci în raporturile dintre lucruri… A apărut o lume de însușiri fără om, de experiențe fără cel care le trăiește. Aproape s-ar zice că într-un caz ideal omul nici n-ar mai trăi vreo experiență la modul privat și povara agreabilă a responsabilității personale s-ar dizolva într-un sistem de formule ale semnificațiilor posibile.”
Robert Musil
Unii îi obiectează azi teatrului că nu ține pasul cu vremea. După a mea părere, îl ține prea mult. De aici îi vin slăbiciunea și caracterul vremelnic. Vreau să spun că teatrul ține prea mult pasul cu vremea și totodată nu îndeajuns. Fiecare timp cere introducerea unui „în afara timpului” ce nu poate fi comunicat, în timp, în lumea comunicării. Totul e clipă circumscrisă în istorie, vezi bine. Dar în fiecare clipă stă istoria întreagă: orice istorie e valabilă dacă e transistorică; în ceea ce este individual citim universalul.
Eugène Ionesco
“The secret of success is to be fully awake to everything about you.”
Jackson Pollock
“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
Richard Rohr
“Peste tot credinţele vechi mor, un materialism brutal le ia locul, cultura secolului, mână-n mână cu sărăcia claselor lucrătoare, ameninţă toată clădirea măreaţă a civilizaţiei creştine. Shakespeare cedează în faţa bufoneriilor şi dramelor de incest şi adulteriu, cancanul alungă pe Beethoven, ideile mari asfinţesc, zeii mor.”
Eminescu – (Articol apărut în TIMPUL, la 9 ianuarie 1879, cu titlul “Credem că destul am vorbit…”
“Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.”
Schopenhauer
“The simplest and bravest way to counter the plight of disheartenment is to move toward what is precious.”
Mark Nepo
“Love expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see them, wholeheartedly — springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself.”
Barbara Fredrickson
„Nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. (…) We will gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“It is our knowledge – the things we are sure of – that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning”
Lincoln Steffens
“I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer moralists who promise me nothing
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.”
Wislawa Szymborska – Possibilities
“Its presence is a torture for the eyes and for the soul, because beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. He is at ease in sincerity.”
Albert Camus
“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.”
James Baldwin
“Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.”
Khalil Gibran
“There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.”
“In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame”
-Mark Nepo
“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.”
“Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.”
“Mistakes cannot be erased but move you from the present position.”
“Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.”
“Tolerate chaos”
-Richard Diebenkorn
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
Anne Frank
“Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it”
Simone Weil
“The humility of wonder opens everything”
Mark Nepo
“Love itself is not selfish, devouring or cruel, but in human beings it suffers a terrible coexistence with those qualities.”
John Bertram
“The man who will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.”
Anthony Trollope
“We attain freedom as we let go of whatever does not reflect our magnificence. A bird cannot fly high or far with a stone tied to its back. But release the impediment, and we are free to soar to unprecedented heights.”
Alan Cohen
“Accepting what we’re given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.”
Mark Nepo
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.”
Toni Morrison
“We’re all curious about what might hurt us.”
“What awaits the heart
if Love bears no arrows?”
Federico García Lorca
“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion”
“The pretty, initial position, which falls short of completeness, is not to be valued, except as a stimulus for further moves.”
“Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities, but consider them absolutely expendable”
“Somehow don’t be bored, but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential”
“Mistakes can’t be erased, but they move you from the present position”
“Don’t ‘discover’ a subject – of any kind”
-Richard Diebenkorn
“Viaţa cere uitare. Ca să ne aducem aminte, trebuie ca înainte să fi uitat.”
Valentin Nicolau
“You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”
Caroline Paul
“(…) when you have people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if you don’t doubt whether you actually exist. I look at my hands half expecting to see clear through them.”
Haruki Murakami
”Prin cuvinte oamenii îşi comunică idei, sentimente, informaţii. Şi acel extaz în faţa binelui, frumosului şi adevărului, care nu-ţi îngăduie să taci. În faţa frumosului, lămuri el, singurătatea devine apăsătoare. Şi e o seară prea frumoasă, domnule…”
N. S. – Jurnalul fericirii
“To love is virtually to know; to know is not virtually to love.
The redemption wrought by science or by intellectual love is then inferior to the redemption wrought by will or by moral love. The first may free a man from himself, it may enfranchise him from egotism. The second drives the ego out of itself, makes it active and fruitful. The one is critical, purifying, negative; the other is vivifying, fertilizing, positive.
Science is the power of man, and love his strength; man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.
It is by love only that one keeps hold upon reality, that one recovers one’s proper self, that one becomes again will, force, and individuality.
Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.
We are never more disconnected with others than when we are disconnected with ourselves.
Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.
Our duty is to be useful not according to our desire, but according to our powers.
True humility is contentment.”
-Henri-Frédéric Amiel
“It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object.
Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.
I begin to feel an enormous need to become savage and to create a new world.
I shut my eyes in order to see.
If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.
It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of a common task.”
-Paul Gauguin
“If I did not succeed I still thought that what I had worked on would be continued. Not immediately. But there are others who believe in things that are true”
Vincent van Gogh
„Caută însoțirea celor ce sunt de o taină cu tine”
Sf. Isaac Sirul
“Define yourself for yourself, or you will be crunched into other people’s fantasies for you and eaten alive.”
“Your silence will not protect you. (…) When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
Audre Lorde
The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.
Everybody needs to be understood.
And out of that comes every form of love.
-Sherwin Nuland
„Iubește arta în tine și nu pe tine în artă”
Konstantin Stanislavski
The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity.
Pearl S. Buck
“Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.”
Helen Keller
„Love and grief enable us to feel how we’re all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away”.
Mark Nepo
„A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own”.
Mark Nepo
„To find yourself in the infinite,
You must distinguish and then combine;
Therefore my winged song thanks
The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.”
„Most pioneers are at the mercy of doubt at the beginning, whether of their worth, of their theories, or of the whole enigmatic field in which they labour.”
-Goethe
“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.”
-Alice Munro
“Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading — the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the respondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.”
E.B. White
“Non si interrompe mai un’emozione”
Federico Fellini
„The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.”
“The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.”
-Mark Nepo
“Attention without feeling … is only a report.”
Mary Oliver
La fel ca într-o lentă călătorie cu trăsura pe vremea lui Stendhal, se cuvine să fim în stare să descoperim încetul cu încetul frumusețea peisajelor sufletului pe care le străbatem; fiecare nouă cupolă de pasiune trebuie să apară treptat, la momentul potrivit, astfel încât spiritul fiecărui cititor să aibă răgazul să le «savureze»…
Salvador Dali
“Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf.
For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things.
And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light.”
Kahlil Gibran
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
Stanley Kubrick
“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.”
Jack Gilbert – A Brief for the Defense
“I have been alone but seldom
lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well
of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight
sitting
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.
(…)
drink from the well
of your self
and begin
again.”
Charles Bukowski
“If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.”
Mark Nepo
„When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
Marcus Aurelius
“I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.”
Maya Angelou
„Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.”
Mark Nepo
„Nu‑i om pe lume să n‑aibă nevoie de ajutorul tău. Ia seama mai întâi la suferinţa sufletelor. Cum să‑l ajuţi, nu‑i carte să te înveţe. Fă‑o cu gingăşie. Şi cu mare umilinţă. Mândria otrăveşte roadele iubirii. Şi uneori e bine iubirea să lucreze, alteori mai bine e să aştepte până ce inima‑i vesteşte. Că iubirea pururi cată la celălalt, gata în orice clipă să‑i sară în ajutor. Şi rugăciunea o luminează când şi cum să ajute. Şi tot ea ne face în chip minunat văzători ai tainei celui de lângă noi… Iubirea nu cere mari isprăvi şi planuri mari; face mult bine doar cu o vorbă bună, cu o privire, cu o mică rugăciune…”
Părintele Serghie
„Try not to be concerned with it. It’s a spiritual thing. Don’t look for the results, don’t live in the payoff. Live in the moment – which is a spiritual principle. Live in the moment and let the results take care of themselves. It’s in the hands of God. [The rest] is all ego. And I have learned, over the years, it’s got nothing to do with me. As my life is none of my business”
“[On playing Shakespeare] You relax within the verse. You realize the structure of the verse and relax into it. It’s like swimming. Or riding a bike. You can’t make it sound real if you are thinking it through as you go. You can’t think through Shakespeare, you have to speak it. And listen to the rhythm of it and then it takes you over. And to make it sound real you speak as if you believe it. Don’t act it. Just be it.”
“When you are at the right age to play Hamlet you are still to young and immature to play it. It is much later, when you get the life experience and the emotional power, that you understand Hamlet or Macbeth.”
-Sir Anthony Hopkins
“Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.”
Rumi
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
Leo Tolstoy
“His own intention, then, is to distinguish the rules that enhance clarity, grace, and emotional resonance from those that are based on myths and misunderstandings and to supplant dogma about usage with reason and evidence, so that we can learn to apply these insights mindfully rather than robotically and begin to counter the mindless momentum of language. (…) Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived. (…) Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence”
Steven Pinker
“When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.”
Mark Nepo
„What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths.
The barriers of the fear-ridden I can only be broken by love.
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble.”
-Kafka
Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important.
And do not long, through vanity, for too hasty manifestation of one’s essence.
Whence: do not seek to be through the vain desire to appear; but rather because it is fitting to be so.
Dare to be yourself.
Don’t ever do anything through affectation or to make people like you or through imitation or for the pleasure of contradicting.
-André Gide
„To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.”
Mark Nepo
“The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection.”
Oscar Wilde – “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
„Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.”
George Eliot
„ Fear keeps you from experiencing the good things that are your natural state of being!”
James van Praagh
„Often, our attempt to turn what we don’t like or fear into something else has us bypass the very lessons put in our path to break our self-centeredness.”
Mark Nepo
„Avem suficientă religie pentru a ne urî unii pe alții, dar nu destulă pentru a ne iubi” – pentru că nu ține de religie, nu pentru că n-ar fi destulă.
Jonathan Swift
„Stop thinking about art as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences”
Roy Ascott
„It’s so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul.”
„We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.”
-Willa Cather
„The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.
Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life. While intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life.
it is impossible for intelligence to reabsorb instinct. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence, nor, consequently, can it be analyzed.”
-Henri Bergson
„The intellect by itself is the seat of trouble.”
Anaïs Nin
Breaking Surface
Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won’t let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can’t be done.
Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.
You are the only explorer.
Your heart, the unreadable compass.
Your soul, the shore of a promise
too great to be ignored.
Mark Nepo
“When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in a crisis of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavors in which the masses most readily unite [are] basically a search for pride.
There is fear and intolerance in pride; it is insensitive and uncompromising. The less promise and potency in the self, the more imperative is the need for pride. The core of pride is self-rejection.”
“To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are… The very people who are most self-dissatisfied and crave most for a new identity have the least self-awareness. They have turned away from an unwanted self and hence never had a good look at it. The result is that those most dissatisfied can neither dissimulate nor attain a real change of heart.”
-Bruce Lee
“Confidence is a static state. Determination is active. Determination allows for doubt and for humility — both of which are critical in the world today. There is so much that we don’t know, and so much that we know we don’t know. To be overly confident or without doubt seems silly to me.
Determination, on the other hand, is a commitment to win, a commitment to fight the good fight.”
“Self-esteem cannot really be built from the outside. You begin to see the real evidence that you can, in fact, affect the things around you. These experiences ultimately integrate themselves inside — if that foundation is there. Self-esteem does not come from surrounding yourself with people and things that seem to increase your value. Real self-esteem is an integration of an inner value with things in the world around you.
It’s about your worth. Your self-worth… You — and only you — can ultimately put the price tag on that. Your tag reveals not only how you value yourself, but how imaginative and original you are about valuing others. In my experience, happier people are people who have not only a high price tag on themselves, but a high price tag on the people around them — and the tags don’t necessarily have to do with market value. They have to do with all the sense that adds up to human value.”
-Anna Deavere Smith
“It’s the sudden appearance of truth and light that brings the mystery and potency of the Universe alive.
The journey of living requires us not just to understand, but to enter. Transformation begins when we stop watching.”
-Mark Nepo
“The Highest is not to comprehend the Highest, but to do it, including all the burdens it involves.”
Søren Kierkegaard
“You may be the most talented musician, but if your instrument isn’t tuned your music will sound like noise.”
Guru Singh
„You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
……..
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
-Mary Oliver – The Family of Things
„My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.”
Kahlil Gibran
„In time, our assumptions and conclusions harden into a screen or wall that stands between us and direct living.”
Mark Nepo
„And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.
Thus I became a madman.
And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.”
-Kahlil Gibran
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
Pablo Picasso
“It’s easy to forget how wise we can be. We resist our internal wisdom due to any number of reasons, such as fear, fatigue, or inconvenience. We race through our hyperactive lives, so busy with the details of day-to-day living that we end up feeling disconnected from ourselves and each other. But what’s great about the 80-year-old self is that no matter how frantic we get, she is always readily available to us. She is present within each of us, reminding us we can be the best version of ourselves, not through some colossal effort at personal reinvention, but simply by slowing down. We just have to take a moment to pay attention and listen.”
Susan O’Malley
„Adultul creativ este copilul care a supravieţuit”.
„Suntem vulcani. Când noi le oferim altora experienţa noastră ca adevăr, ca adevăr omenesc, toate hărţile se schimbă. Şi sunt munţi noi”.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
“To stay open to the fullness of the human experience requires us to restore trust in the capacity of our heart to meet whatever life brings us.”
Mark Nepo
„The most powerful strand in memoir is not expressing your originality. It’s tapping into your universality. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be original in your writing — you are the only one who can write that universal experience in just that way. Trust that.
Good writing is built on craft and heart… You must do your work and it must cost you everything to do it.”
-Cheryl Strayed
„…choosing the turn of mind that expands your happiness rather than contracting it.”
David Hume
“Give up linear thinking and rigid, left-brain expectations of what spirituality means. Life is not one dimensional. If you are looking for the absolute, you will not find it in the conditional.”
“Abuse and betrayal happen when plans are held rigidly or agreements are broken in fear.”
– Paul Ferrini – The Silence in the Heart
“Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
“We cannot teach people anything. We can only help discover it within themselves.”
Galileo Galilei
„…făceam o teoretizare a moralei laice. “Science des moeurs” / “Ştiinţa moravurilor” pe care o socoteam autonomă şi care mi se părea că nu are nevoie de motivaţie religioasă. Mai târziu mi-am dat seama că omul la scara lui, ca şi natura, nu sunt surse ale adevărului, ci îl reflectă în măsura în care vrea Dumnezeu şi atunci mi-am dat seama că nu trebuie să te ancorezi în morala laică, ci în morala religioasă ca morală. Această ştiinţă a moravurilor seamănă cu “Mersul trenurilor”, după părerea mea. Poţi să-l schimbi la ce staţie vrei.
Omul autonom nu e capabil să creeze o ordine morală. O primeşte de sus, sau nu. Asta-i poziţia mea în raporturile dintre om şi divinitate. Că dacă raportul dintre om şi divinitate dispare, nu e posibilă nicio morală. Ba, mai mult, nu e posibil niciun adevăr.”
-Petre Țuțea
“Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love — and I mean love, not lust — is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peeks through, say, this is a challenge to my compassion. Then make a try, and something might begin to get going here. You might begin to be quit of your fix on your anima.”
Joseph Campbell
“There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”
Susan Sontag
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
“Nature, the soul, love and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason. Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire.”
Dostoevsky
“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.”
Martha Nussbaum
“When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.”
Paul Brunton
“Să te bucuri de tine însuţi şi de bunurile ce provin din tine.”
Seneca.
„There is no right way, there is no wrong way, there is just a heart way. The heart is a vastly intelligent organ. It sees and hears before anything else so listen with your heart.”
Gillian MacBeth-Louthan
“Cultivatorul va pierde tot ce a semănat dacă munca sa se opreşte la sămânţă; abia după multă îngrijire semănăturile se transformă în recoltă”
Seneca
„Alternarea diferitelor nivele de conștiință, schimbarea ritmică a intereselor este, în acest sens, necesară și salvatoare, ca și schimbarea veghei și a somnului. Eu m-am dezvățat de mult timp (…) să mă îngrozesc din cauza epocilor de stupiditate: știu că o stupiditate trecătoare este tocmai condiția prealabilă a unei viitoare iluminări.”
Hermann von Keyserling
„Eu iubesc viața și nu voluptățile, eu vreau să creez și nu să trăiesc la întâmplare.”
Marin Preda
“Despite how open, peaceful and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves.”
Matt Kahn
“When I’m not happy, I know I’m not being 100% honest with myself somewhere.”
“Clarity comes from being intimate with yourself.”
“If you share your heart with someone and they don’t respect it, you know where you belong and where you don’t.”
“We can say what we mean, deeply, authentically, without an agenda to get anyone to agree, but only a need to express the truth within!”
-Ann Albers
“When love is not a feeling to chase or hold in place, but the compassionate support that befriends each emotion and embraces how you feel, you are able to find the companionship you desire without abandoning yourself in the process. In every breath, you deserve more love, not less. This is how acceptance blossoms for the wellbeing of all. It is the way of heart-centered consciousness.”
Matt Kahn
„Adevărata ordine nu e de găsit în parcul Curții Regale franceze, ci tocmai în locul cel mai renumit pentru luxurianța lui haotică, în „pădurea primitivă din Lumea Nouă“.
Trebuie să ne ferim să confundăm ordinea cu regularitatea. Regularitatea nu priveşte decît forma exterioară; ordinea rezultă din fondul însuşi al lucrurilor […] Creatorul, care vede de la înălţime, ordonează; imitatorul, care priveşte de aproape, regularizează; cel dintîi procedează după legea propriei sale naturi, al doilea după regulile şcolii lui.
Dacă punem alături și faimoasa metaforă hegeliană a stejarului existent deja, in nuce, în minuscula ghindă, ne va deveni și mai limpede pledoaria marelui romantic.”
-Liviu Papadima
“Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.”
„I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world — some do it with their society, some with their wit, some with their benevolence, some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet, and in a thousand ways all equally dutiful to the command of Great Nature. There is but one way for me — the road lies through application of study and thought.”
-John Keats
“Shalom (peace) is the elimination of hostile conflict, but not the dissolution of individuality and uniqueness. To create perfect harmony we must find shared common interest and goals, but not eliminate individuality in the process.
Equality and sameness are not equated, and true equality is the celebration and recognition of individuality. Shalom is a symphony of single notes, a blending of divergent ideas and expressions, all working towards a common score, creating a perfect harmony.”
-Rav DovBer Pinson
“The secret of life is to change our approach: to come out of our limited quality of reception and enter the eternal quality of giving.”
Rav Michael Laitman
„An awakened being offers their support wherever it is necessary in the most peaceful way for the well-being of all innocent hearts. Just as the life force energy of a tree provides nourishment to each of its branches, an awakened being allows any aspect of humanity to be honored as the outer layers of their infinite energy field. To turn away from form doesn’t bring you any closer to the truth that lives within it. If you know it’s all a play, then play full on. Why not play for real? If you know that nothing but truth exists, then may you stand for truth to inspire such a reality to awaken in all. This is the heart of conscious action.”
Matt Kahn
„The past will always ‘inform’ the future. To deny that is to delude. Yet, it need not ‘determine’ the future.” – source unknown
„Success without effort is hollow. It is the very fact that it didn’t come easily that imbues triumph with meaning.”
-Jonathan Fields
„After you have made your choice, Providence will be your guide.”
Morgan Freeman
„If you try to comprehend air before breathing it, you will die.”
Mark Nepo
„Time does not heal all wounds, but gives us the tools to endure them.”
Patti Smith
“Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.”
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
“It is given to the seer to see, but it is then his responsibility to communicate what he sees, that they who cannot see may see.”
“I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”
-Denise Levertov
“No matter what people say; we painters work better in the country, everything there speaks more clearly, everything holds firm, everything explains itself…”
Vincent van Gogh
„Primul pas în cercetarea-de-sine este să vezi cât de laşi suntem, cât ne ferim de orice ocazie de cercetare adevărată, cât ne ferim de nesaţ sau de senzaţia de lipsă. Noi le putem înţelege intelectual, dar nu le putem accepta cu adevărat. Îndată ce admitem această reacţie, noi vom simţi viaţa provocându-ne să cercetăm în fiece moment. Întrebarea este întotdeauna acolo, în fundalul tuturor activităţilor noastre compensatorii.
Odată ce am acceptat provocarea vieţii, noi trebuie să ştim cum să punem întrebarea, aşa încât aceasta să aibă forţă, să fie eficientă, să nu ne dezamăgească. Noi trebuie să ne convingem că întrebarea ne va aduce răspunsul. Cercetarea noastră trebuie să devină valoroasă.”
-Jean Klein
„God created what we know as physical life as a means by which God could experience Itself in all its wonder and glory.
There are two ways that a human being can realize (that is, make real) this experience. One way is through impression, another is through expression. The first is created by incoming energy, the second by outgoing energy.”
Neale Walsch
“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”
― Nikki Giovanni
“I don’t paint things. I paint the difference between things.”
– Henri Matisse
“One day, you will feel a joy in having resisted the temptation to hate, and there is truly intoxicating poetry in the goodness of him who has suffered.”
– Paul Gauguin
“In every situation that you are in in life, there is a higher way to deal with that situation.
There always is a higher way to deal with it than being reactive – which is the only thing the mind is gonna do.”
– Michael A. Singer
„Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art – but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.”
– Stephen Vizinczey
“Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.”
– J.F. Kennedy
“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct.”
„The wise man’s public lives far away, or does not yet exist; it reads instead of listens; it is so austere and correct that recognition with gratitude and respect is only extended to new facts that are placed in circulation on the cultural market.”
„All of this happens because when they started out these men did not follow with humility and modesty a law of nature that is the essence of good sense: Tackle small problems first, so that if success smiles and strength increases one may then undertake the great feats of investigation.”
– Santiago Ramón y Cajal
“Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.”
“Culture consists of connections, not of separations; to specialize is to isolate.”
– Carlos Fuentes
“The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect.”
– Rebecca Solnit
“Să luăm ca exemple oglinda şi focul. Orice ciob de oglindă realizează aceeaşi funcţiune ca şi o oglindă cât de mare. Orice scânteie poate recupera un foc oricât de mare. În asta constă principiul holografic pe care se bazează ca pe un fel de axiomă toate miturile. Există credinţa că individualul, localul în anumite situaţii poate recupera globalul, totalitatea. Clipa poate da seamă despre eternitate şi vecinătatea unui punct poate să dea seamă despre întregul univers spaţial.”
Solomon Marcus, în “Răni deschise 5 – Focul şi Oglinda”
“Wisdom does not lead to madness, nor denial to sanity: the confrontation with the givens of existence is painful, but ultimately healing.”
– Yrvin D. Yalom
„În tine există ceva extraordinar de frumos, de inteligent, de iubitor și de liniștit. Acest ceva a existat dintotdeauna și va exista veșnic înăuntrul tău, oricine ai fi tu.”
– Adrian Nuță, „Între nicăieri și altundeva”
„We’re not suffering from a lack of things; we’re suffering from a lack of awareness of the divine presence in our lives”.
– Panache Desai
“It’s been communicated in the teachings of the ancient wisdom keepers that one must hold the space that is not yet occupied, in order to open the space that does not yet exist.”
“Give yourself the right to really be you.
Commit to a daily process that convinces you of who you truly are in practical terms.
Launch this as a commitment so that it obligates you to be proactive when you’d rather hide.
Rejuvenate yourself. Be bold and don’t ever fold. ”
– Guru Singh
„Durați-vă din visuri un refugiu undeva, în deșert, înainte de a vă înălța o casă între zidurile cetății.”
– Kahlil Gibran – Profetul
“You thought about it plenty. But you never stopped to feel it.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
„I think we’re waking up from something. Universal compassion is a grand part of our next phase as human beings and is slowly being unveiled, like a piece of art we’ve been working on for centuries, but which we are yet to see in its entirety.”
– Simon van Booy
“Să știți că visele se împlinesc întotdeauna, nu dorințele. Visele nasc pasiune, iar pasiunea duce la rezultate.”
– Sabin Bălașa
„I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.”
– John O’Donohue – from CONAMARA BLUES
„If we’re not grounded and fully engaged, our gifts will be muffled and our good intentions will be neutralized. The life of our gifts depends on not hiding.”
– Mark Nepo – More Together Than Alone
“Infinite patience produces immediate results.
Because the immediate result of infinite patience is peace.”
– Wayne Dyer
My mind is my shelter 
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