Tsvetoslav Shalev > Tsvetoslav's Quotes

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#1

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
― Lao Tzu

tags: acceptance, change, life, reality, serenity

3873 likes

#2

“I sit before flowers
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up

I stand on mountain tops believing
that avalanches will teach me to let go

I know
nothing

but I am here to learn.”
― Shane Koyczan

304 likes

#3

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: atheism, reason, science, skeptic

3317 likes

#4

“It’s quite easy to become Men Without Women. You love a woman deeply, and then she goes off somewhere. That’s all it takes. Most of the time (as I’m sure you’re well aware) it’s crafty sailors who take them away. They sweet-talk them into going with them, then carry them off to Marseilles or the Ivory Coast. And there’s hardly anything we can do about it. Or else the women have nothing to do with sailors, and take their own lives. And there’s very little we can do about that, too. Not even the sailors can do a thing.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

8 likes

#5

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

(Little Gidding)”
― T.S. Eliot

tags: new-beginnings, new-year, new-year-s-day

819 likes

#6

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
― Robert Frost

tags: impermanence, nature, poem

2107 likes

#7

“The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

tags: lies, lying, truth

466 likes

#8

“If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

58 likes

#9

“Životna snaga jednog čoveka meri se, pored ostalog, i njegovom sposobnošću zaboravljanja.”
― Ivo Andrić

43 likes

#10

“December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...”
― John Geddes A Familiar Rain

tags: breath, cloud, december, frost, memory, summer, winter

122 likes

#11

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

tags: butterflies, days, fanny-brawne, fifty-common-years, letter, love, summer, three

2280 likes

#12

“Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven, shall behold the night of our solemnities.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

tags: days, nights, passage-of-time, time

32 likes

#13

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

tags: become, elena, elena-ferrante, ferrante, lila

161 likes

#14

“As for Proust, his contribution has been to create, from an obstinate contemplation of reality, a closed
world that belonged only to him and that indicated his victory over the transitoriness of things and over
death. But he uses absolutely the opposite means. He upholds, above everything, by a deliberate choice, a
careful selection of unique experience, which the writer chooses from the most secret recesses of his past.
Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace in the memory. If the
American novel is the novel of men without memory, the world of Proust is nothing but memory. It is
concerned only with the most difficult and most exacting of memories, the memory that rejects the
dispersion of the actual world and derives, from the trace of a lingering perfume, the secret of a new and
ancient universe. Proust chooses the interior life and, of the interior life, that which is more interior than
life itself in preference to what is forgotten in the world of reality— in other words, the purely mechanical
and blind aspects of the world. But by his rejection of reality he does not deny reality. He does not
commit the error, which would counterbalance the error of American fiction, of suppressing
the mechanical. He unites, on the contrary, into a superior form of unity, the memory of the past and the
immediate sensation, the twisted foot and the happy days of times past.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

5 likes

#15

“Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.
Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination.
Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference.
Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different - that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

tags: difference, otherness, racism, radical-alterity, sameness, terror

2 likes

#16

“Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?

Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.

We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

tags: amazing, atheism, atheist, believer, book, burn, christianity, christians, comprehension, creed, despise, destroy, differ, difference, dogma, earth, enemy, enslaved, existence, fairness, forgiveness, freedom, freedom-of-speech, friends, friendship, grandeur, hate, hatred, heaven, hell, human, imprison, investigate, joy, knowledge, love, mankind, opinion, pain, paradise, permission, persecute, power, predestination, rights, suffering, thought, trinity, worship

170 likes

#17

“You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.”
― Paul Gallico

tags: heroes, humanity, villains

95 likes

#18

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

tags: magic-carpet, time

413 likes

#19

“Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.”
― Vladimir Nabokov (translator)

tags: imagination

340 likes

#20

“Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977

tags: loneliness

199 likes

#21

“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

79 likes

#22

“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

74 likes

#23

“Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

62 likes

#24

“It’s painful, loving someone from afar.
Watching them – from the outside.
The once familiar elements of their life reduced to nothing more than occasional mentions in conversations and faces changing in photographs…..
They exist to you now as nothing more than living proof that something can still hurt you … with no contact at all.”
― Ranata Suzuki

tags: always-yours, beautiful, beautiful-quote, break-up-quotes, break-ups, breakup, breakup-quote, breakup-quotes, broken-heart, deep-love, deep-love-quotes, deep-thoughts, distance, distance-relationship, feelings, feelings-and-emotions, feelings-of-love, from-a-distance, grief, grief-and-loss, grief-quotes, grieving, heartbreak, heartbreak-quotes, heartbroken, heartbroken-quotes, i-miss-you, loss, loss-of-love, loss-quote, loss-quotes, lost, lost-love, lost-love-quotes, love, love-quotations, love-quote, love-quotes, love-quotes-and-sayings, missing-someone, missing-you-quotes, quote, quotes, ranata-suzuki, ranata-suzuki-quote, sad, sad-quote, sad-quotes, sadness, secret-love, the-one-that-got-away, the-only-one, unrequited, unrequited-love, without-you

367 likes

#25

“In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy daily bread: it was not a curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

tags: balm, brow, curse, daily-bread, existence, sweat

6 likes

#26

“There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you

sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates.”
― Edwin Morgan, The Second Life: Selected Poems

tags: bittersweet, communion, lovers, memory, moment, past-love, perfection, scotland, strawberries, summer

27 likes

#27

“Besides that, his secret - and principal - reason for retiring was to devote himself entirely to his idée fixe, his collection which was becoming ever larger and more complicated. Van Hulle's concern was no longer simply to have beautiful clocks or rare timepieces; his feelings for them were not simply those one has for inanimate objects. True, their outward appearance was still important, their craftsmanship, their mechanisms, heir value as works of art, but the fact that he had collected so many was for a different reason entirely. It was a result of his strange preoccupation with the exact time. It was no longer enough for him that they were interesting. He was irritated by the differences in time they showed. Above all when they struck the hours and the quarters. One, very old, was deranged and got confused in keeping count of the passage of time, which it had been doing for so long. Others were behind, little Empire clocks with children's voices almost, as if they had not quite grown up. In short, the clocks were always at variance. They seemed to be running after each other, calling out, getting lost, looking for each other at all the changing crossroads of time.”
― Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

tags: clock, clocks, exact-time, idée-fixe, time

2 likes

#28

“But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

tags: clock, dreams, man, precognition, time

2 likes

#29

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

tags: inspirational, life, philosophy

5878 likes

#30

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

tags: 1956, love

400 likes

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