More serious Quotes

[grannywils]

Ninja:

 

"If you can make a woman laugh, you can do anything with her." - Nicol Williamson

"Nature says to a woman: 'Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to be, but be respected (my addition-"and respectful"), that is essential" - Pierre Beaumarchais

[grannywils]

I don't know where all the posters went, but I have a few today that I felt like sharing:

Mark Twain:

"That kind of so-called houskeeping where they have six Bibles and no cork-screw"

"The man who does not read good books has not advantage over the man who can't read them" (amen brother)

"Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen"

 

Proverb

"Patience is a bitter plant but it has sweet fruit"

 

Shakespeare

"Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all"

"Love sought is good, but given unsought is better"

 

Goethe

"Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake"

[SilverDNA]

"In the true man there is a child hidden: it wanteth to play. Up then, ye women, and discover the child in man!"

XVIII. Old and young Women.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche

[SilverDNA]

"I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several."

Rainer Maria Rilke

[grannywils]

"Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so" - Anonymous

 

"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice" - Confucius

[SilverDNA]

Unlimited and timeless access to the Goblins Club

including lifetime membership

Are you familiar with the transparent type of fantastic mirror which is like a window – in which you can see a landscape – in which all the objects in your room are reflected? Suddenly you recognise the person beside you for what they really are, like in that initial moment when they first wake up – with tousled hair, totally relaxed, not yet tensed, without a name or career or social standing. And then later, in that state of apparent wakefulness, they become a caricature, they turn into a bustling clown in their own circus and after a humble appearance, they must roll up their carpets again. In the end they remain jesters,buffoons.

And then there's that strange feeling when you're standing in front of the mirror, early in the morning, drying your face and you imagine that you just washed your thoughts along with everything else-and maybe in doing so you destroyed a fragment of eternal truth with a handful of water. Maybe you yourself are a goblin – in the midst of an entire world which has existed many times before. Maybe you are living on the lowest planet level –maybe our earth is as meaningful of other planets as was Leonardo da Vinci's dog some past century ago as it just now went round that corner? What would happen if da Vinci's dog suddenly paused under the light of a gas lantern and it realised that life is the search for the 'nothing' after the 'something'? Da Vinci would be happy to have learned something from his dog. And in return he would tell the animal something about the body – which translates the soul into the visible.

But now the day is completely worn out, let's climb back slowly to the morning.

(a few thoughts from Christian Morgenstern while having a cup of Earl Gray in an old tea house in Berlin in the year 1906)

 

[grannywils]

Unlimited and timeless access to the Goblins Club

including lifetime membership

Are you familiar with the transparent type of fantastic mirror which is like a window in which you can see a landscape in which all the objects in your room are reflected? Suddenly you recognise the person beside you for what they really are, like in that initial moment when they first wake up with tousled hair, totally relaxed, not yet tensed, without a name or career or social standing. And then later, in that state of apparent wakefulness, they become a caricature, they turn into a bustling clown in their own circus and after a humble appearance, they must roll up their carpets again. In the end they remain jesters,buffoons.

And then there's that strange feeling when you're standing in front of the mirror, early in the morning, drying your face and you imagine that you just washed your thoughts along with everything else-and maybe in doing so you destroyed a fragment of eternal truth with a handful of water. Maybe you yourself are a goblin in the midst of an entire world which has existed many times before. Maybe you are living on the lowest planet level maybe our earth is as meaningful of other planets as was Leonardo da Vinci's dog some past century ago as it just now went round that corner? What would happen if da Vinci's dog suddenly paused under the light of a gas lantern and it realised that life is the search for the 'nothing' after the 'something'? Da Vinci would be happy to have learned something from his dog. And in return he would tell the animal something about the body which translates the soul into the visible.

But now the day is completely worn out, let's climb back slowly to the morning.

(afew thoughts from Christian Morgenstern while having a cup of Earl Gray in an old tea house in Berlin in the year 1906)

 

 

Wow, Silver. While I was reading that it made me think of something I read by one of the Bronte's I think. But I cannot remember which sister or which book. It was not one of the more popular ones, but I think it was one of the better ones. I'm going to have to try and track it down. Edit: Or no, maybe it was Daphne DuMaurier. Now I cannot be certain. Something to do with what we see in the mirror.....

[grannywils]

Scrub by Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

If I grow bitterly,

Like a gnarled and stunted tree,

Bearing harshly of my youth

Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;

If I make of my drawn boughs

An inhospitable house,

Out of which I never pry

Towards the water and the sky,

Under which I stand and hide

And hear the day go by outside;

It is that a wind too strong

Bent my back when I was young,

It is that I fear the rain

Lest it blister me again.

[SilverDNA]

I found this Awesome translation:

The Panther

 

In Jardin des Plantes, Paris

His gaze has grown so weary from the passing

Of bars that there is nothing it can hold.

There seem to be a thousand bars about him,

And, out beyond a thousand bars, no world.

 

Revolving in the very smallest circle,

The sleekly powered footsteps' mellow stride

Is like a dance of strength about a center

In which a mighty will stands stupefied.

 

Only at times the pupil's soundless curtain

Is reeled away, letting an image start

Inward through the taut silence of his sinews

And come to nothing in the heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Good ones here and in awesome quotes topic Granny

here is a good, but German version of The Panther on Youtube

Edited August 11, 2010 by SilverDNA

[grannywils]

I found this Awesome translation:

The Panther

His gaze has grown so weary from the passing

Of bars that there is nothing it can hold.

There seem to be a thousand bars about him,

And, out beyond a thousand bars, no world.

 

Revolving in the very smallest circle,

The sleekly powered footsteps' mellow stride

Is like a dance of strength about a center

In which a mighty will stands stupefied.

 

Only at times the pupil's soundless curtain

Is reeled away, letting an image start

Inward through the taut silence of his sinews

And come to nothing in the heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Good ones here and in awesome quotes topic Granny

 

Thanks Silver. Yours too. Can't you just feel his imprisonment in those words?