Quotes about life and people
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“Maybe it's not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate.”
Source: Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard of Ozz
“Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.”
Book V.
Aurora Leigh http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html (1857)
Variant: Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.
“If you go through life without connecting to people, how much could you call that a life?”
Context: Grace Jones said this to me when I met her. I washed her feet, and I looked up at her and she said, "No matter what you do in your life, don’t you ever let anybody take your creative people away from you." And what my creative friends always remind me of is they say, "Only value the opinion of those that you respect. And anyone that you don’t respect, pay no mind to their opinion about you or anything else." And that’s how I live my life. If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist.
“There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.”
“Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.”
Source: The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, Ch. 1.
Foreword
The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism
Context: With the development of the very deep economic crisis, with the general crisis of capitalism becoming sharply accentuated and the mass of working people becoming revolutionized, fascism has embarked upon a wide offensive. The ruling bourgeoisie more and more seeks salvation in fascism, with the object of taking exceptional predatory measures against the working people, preparing for an imperialist war of plunder, attacking the Soviet Union, enslaving and partitioning China, and by all these means preventing revolution. The imperialist circles are trying to shift the whole burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the working people. That is why they need fascism. They are trying to solve the problem of markets by enslaving the weak nations, by intensifying colonial oppression and repartitioning the world anew by means of war. That is why they need fascism.
As quoted in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns : A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1958) by Robert Jungk, as translated by James Cleugh, p. 22
Anecdotally, when Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen, Dirac supposedly came to him one day and said: "Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say... something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand."
China as a Heap of Loose Sand (1924)
“Only powerful people have liberty.”
As quoted in "The Economist" (8 October 2011), p. 67
“Mimì never forgets to see the beauty in life.”
Original: (de) Mimi vergisst nie, die Schönheit im Leben zu sehen, und ist nicht verbittert.
Variant: Mimi never forgets to see the beauty in life and is not bitter.
Source: https://www.frizzmag.de/kultur-freizeit/kultur--buehne/La-Boheme-neue-Version-Staatstheater/
Context: Mimì is a character in Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème. Although she is terminally ill, she enjoys life.
“Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, “from their mother’s womb” all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.”
O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis foelicitatem! Cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt (ut ait Lucilius) e bulga matris quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia planta fiet, si sensualia obrutescet, si rationalia caeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia angelus erit et Dei filius. Et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestabit.
6. 24-31; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Alternate translation of 6. 28-29 (Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo.):
The Father infused in man, at birth, every sort of seed and sprouts of every kind of life. These seeds will grow and bear their fruit in each man who will cultivate them.
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)
“People are not lazy, they simply have impotent goals.. that is.. goals that do not inspire them.”