Madhumala Basu > Madhumala's Quotes

“If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.”
― Arthur Golden

“I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be? The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign. This was why the bearded man had opened the window in my dream. He was saying to me, "Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.”
― Arthur Golden

“Chairman: "Sometimes", he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.”
― Martin Buber

“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. ”
― Martin Buber

“There are three principles in a man's being and life:
The principle of thought, the principle of speech,
and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict
between me and my fellow-men is that I do not
say what I mean and I don't do what I say.”
― Martin Buber

“Solitude is the place of purification.”
― Martin Buber

“If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman”
― Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman