Martin Svoboda
@quick, member from April 4, 2011
Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life http://www.spiritualbee.com/spiritual-book-by-tagore/ (1916)
Context: In love all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time.
Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest. But this rest itself is an intense form of activity where utter quiescence and unceasing energy meet at the same point in love.
In love, loss and gain are harmonised. In its balance-sheet, credit and debit accounts are in the same column, and gifts are added to gains. In this wonderful festival of creation, this great ceremony of self-sacrifice of God, the lover constantly gives himself up to gain himself in love. Indeed, love is what brings together and inseparably connects both the act of abandoning and that of receiving.
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
Unsourced
“to live means to lack something at every moment”
La guerre, c'est un massacre de gens qui ne se connaissent pas, au profit de gens qui se connaissent, mais ne se massacrent pas.
Bizarre, issues 24-31 (1962), p. 102
This apocryphal quote from Paul Valéry is never precisely sourced: neither on the internet nor in the works we have consulted. See: https://www.guichetdusavoir.org/question/voir/52650
“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”
Unsourced
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XLV Prophecies
“Better to put things at the worst at first, and reserve the best for a surprise.”
Mieux vaut mettre les choses au pis tout de suite, répondit l’ingénieur, et ne se réserver que la surprise du mieux.
Part I, ch. IX
The Mysterious Island (1874)
Context: Better to put things at the worst at first," replied the engineer, "and reserve the best for a surprise.
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Source: The Waves
“The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.”
"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)
Context: The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life … it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Source: A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas
“Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.”
Source: Le Naturalisme Au Theatre