Alone Quotes (page 79)
O night in which the stars feign light, O night that alone is the size of the Universe, make me, body and soul, part of your body, so that—being mere darkness—I’ll lose myself and become night as well, without any dreams as stars within me, nor a hoped-for sun shining with the future.
Fernando Pessoa
Do you know what it is to play a part? To split your personality deliberately for twenty-four hours a day? Even when with friends? Even when alone, so that you will never forget inadvertently? To be a dilettante? To be eternally amused? To be of no account? To be so effete and faintly ridiculous that you have convinced all who know you of your own worthlessness? All so that your life may be safe even though it means it has become barely worth living. But even so, once in a while I...
Isaac Asimov
After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realised that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.
Lanford Wilson
When I Have Fears When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting...
John Keats
We therefore work, not
for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us
what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United
States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched
and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as
princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money
alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For...
Alan Watts
APRIL 16. Away! Away!
The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.
James Joyce
In every idea emanating from genius, or even in every serious human idea -- born in the human brain -- there always remains something -- some sediment -- which cannot be expressed to others, though one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. There is always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from your brain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever, and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very essence of...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
God does hear and answer prayers. I have never doubted that fact. From childhood, at my mother's knee where I first learned to pray; as a young man in my teens; as a missionary in foreign lands; as a father; as a Church leader; as a government official, I know without question that it is possible for men and women to reach out in humility and prayer and tap that Unseen Power; to have prayers answered. "Man does not stand along, or, at least, he need not stand alone. Prayer will open...
Ezra Taft Benson
Creation, whether it's writing, painting or whatever, is essentially despotic and autocratic in nature, because it's the work of one mind and one mind alone which has absolute power of life or death over this sentence, or that phrase or whatever it is. It brooks no interference and can only work if it's the one mind doing it. Reading, on the other hand, interpretation, is inherently, intrinsically democratic, because it is fundamentally a process of negotiation between the mind and the text,...
Philip Pullman
Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.
Oscar Wilde