Only The Wind Knows

Here are the best of the quotes that I’ve slowly accumulated. They are nice, I find, for some beliefs or feelings that are lacking the proper words.

Uncategorized

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
~Oscar Wilde

All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity – it is to destroy it.
~Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight.
Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”
~Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

… no time, no leisure… not a moment to sit down and think– or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma…
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

To see things in the seed, that is genius.
~Lao-Tzu

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.
~Paul Shepard, Man In The Landscape

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
~Henri Bergson

There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
~Euripedes

It is a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.
~Benjamin Franklin

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
~Roy, Blade Runner

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
~Leo Tolstoy

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
~Khalil Gibran

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
~Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Worse than being blind, is to see and have no vision.
~Helen Keller

A stupid man repeats his mistakes, a wise man learns from his mistakes, but a genius learns from the mistakes of others.
~Unknown

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
~Theodore Roosevelt

Literary & Poetic

UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
~Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem

When once you have tasted flight,
you will forever walk this earth with your eyes
turned skyward, for there you have been,
and there you will always long to return.
~Da Vinci

The maple tree that night
Without a wind or rain
Let go its leaves
Because its time had come.
~Eugene McCarthy

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
~T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

OCTOBER COUNTRY
…that country where it is always turning
late in the year. That country where the hills are
fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go
quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-
nights stay. That country composed in the
main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets,
attics, and pantries faced away from the sun.
That country whose people are autumn people,
thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people
passing at night on the empty walks sound
like rain….
~Ray Bradbury

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the long ninth wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild.
But nothing promised that is not performed.
~Robert Graves

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
~Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Philosophy & Religion

Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
~Jean-Paul Sartre

If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
~Seng-Ts’an

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

But I don’t have to know an answer… I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things. By being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell.
~Richard Feynman

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
~Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known.
~Frank Herbert, Dune

Teachers

Fiddling with the lunch schedule? That’s like a butterfly flapping his wings in Japan. The repercussions are unimaginable.
~Todd Kresser

The best thing you can give someone is a surprise.
~Ms. Finklestien