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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 27b8bfd | Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? And could you in any way protect your son from Sansara? How could you? By means of teachings, prayer, admonition? My dear, have you entirely forgotten that story, that story containing so many lessons, that story about Siddhartha, a Brahman's son, which you once told me here on this very spot? Who has kept the Samana Sidd.. | life parenthood | Hermann Hesse | |
| 3e2ed26 | Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking af.. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 2370b66 | The teachers apparently regarded a dead student very differently from a living one. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 4b2a8ea | Nobody really knew anything. People lived; they went here and there about the earth and rode through forests; so much seemed to challenge or to promise, and so many sights to stir our longing: an evening star, a blue harebell, a lake half-covered in green reeds, the eyes of beasts and human eyes; and always it was as though something would happen, something never seen and yet sighed for, as though a veil would be pulled back off the world; .. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| b820eb3 | It was one of the ferryman's greatest virtues that, like few people, he knew how to listen. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 1bb5027 | No hay mas realidad que la que tenemos dentro. Por eso la mayoria de los seres humanos vive tan irrealmente; porque cree que las imagenes exteriores son la realidad y no permiten a su propio mundo interior manifestarse. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| bbc4c54 | No soy un hombre que sabe. He sido un hombre que busca y lo soy aun, pero no busco ya en las estrellas ni en los libros: comienzo a escuchar las ensenanzas que mi sangre murmura en mi. | conocimiento | Hermann Hesse | |
| 1846f65 | This is what makes them so dear and worthy of veneration for me: they are like me. Therefore, I can love them. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 8eac2f4 | The artistically inclined delight in the Game because it provides opportunities for improvisation and fantasy. The strict scholars and scientists despise it - and so do some musicians also - because, they say, it lacks that degree of strictness which their specialties can achieve. Well and good, you will encounter these antinomies, and in time you will discover that they are subjective, not objective - that, for example, a fancy-free artist.. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| b271292 | It is not my place to judge another person's life. Only for myself, for myself alone, I must decide, I must chose, I must refuse. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| dcc01e5 | Oh oak tree, how they have pruned you. Now you stand odd and strangely shaped! You were hacked a hundred times until you had nothing left but spite and will! I am like you, so many insults and humiliations could not shatter my link with life. And every day I raise my head beyond countless insults towards new light. What in me was once gentle, sweet and tender this world has ridiculed to death. But my true self cannot be murdered. I am a.. | trees | Hermann Hesse | |
| 8f7452e | If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasure.. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 45f7cad | There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.' She spoke if in trance, rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. 'Well, and you're mistress of all that,' he said. 'The silence, and the dark. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 5ec26ce | But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days. | hope resignation | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 63328b8 | Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 1457db4 | I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return." "Nothing? You call your theory nothing" "Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot." | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 378ff20 | When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 8419b1c | If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| f4759c4 | The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father's men took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their believe with him. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 2810c01 | The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. In other words, that she's free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind's lake. But in this, responsi.. | muse women writing | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| fae7ce7 | It's your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison? | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| f447f72 | Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead. | earthsea fantasy fantasy-fiction kings | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 9d3b7c0 | It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry. | history inspirational life life-philosophy love poetry | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| ba84a4b | We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 946ff27 | I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| e8ab4e0 | a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 336bad4 | Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?' ...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. | dying inevitability life living | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| b4653b7 | We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| ee66f4f | The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority. | meaning poetry prose tao-te-ching translation | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 097795c | So the unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 0b968b0 | close up, a world's all dirt and rocks... The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 479551c | For heroes do not make history--that is the historian's job--but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| bdbed7a | There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| b5b4be7 | I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| ff5921a | There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly." | humor literature | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 61ebf07 | The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 69d58e2 | Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded. Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves?" | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| a83fd06 | There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk. | language | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 1133111 | Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men. | men women | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| c4d3538 | I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves." "What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried. "No--no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins--it begins in shared pain." | solidarity | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 8275d7d | Man's singularity is his divinity. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 42f4fd2 | If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| ab6b1b1 | None of this is spare time. I can't spare it. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 4ea1d56 | They way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, so we comprehend it - can we even remember it - until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. P.. | Ursula K. Le Guin |