“Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there.”
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky 155
Russian author 1821–1881Related quotes
“Nothing that has happened has made me feel gloomy or remain depressed. I love my life.”
Pavarotti : My World (1995)
“I love beautiful women, and beautiful women love me. It has to be both ways.”
Interview with Norwegian talk show host Fredrik Skavlan in (November 2003).
2000s
Source: "Liu Wen opens up about fame, responsibility and finding meaning in her career" in Vogue https://vogue.sg/liu-wen-cover-vogue-singapore-leslie-zhang/ (1 March 2021)
Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)
Context: Love is not a feeling; it's a sensation. Drinking water when you're thirsty is a sensation, not a feeling. Being in nature or swimming in the sea is a sensation, not a feeling. Lying down when you're tired is sensational, not a feeling, although you may say it feels good. Feeling is an emotional interpretation of experience and these sensations don't need interpretation; they are just good or right. Making physical love rightly is a sensation, not a feeling. So is the love of God. The same goes for joy and beauty; both are sensational.
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.”
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam.
X, 27, as translated in Theology and Discovery: Essays in honor of Karl Rahner, S.J. (1980) edited by William J. Kelly
Variant translations:
So late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! So late I loved you!
The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett (2007), by Lee Oser, p. 29
Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.
Introduction to a Philosophy of Religion (1970) by Alice Von Hildebrand
Confessions (c. 397)
On being accepted by her people as a spokesperson in “‘Recording the Cries of the People’: AN INTERVIEW WITH OODGEROO (KATH WALKER)” http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1725&context=kunapipi in Kunapipi (1988)