Delphine Leardini > Delphine's Quotes

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.”
― George Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....”
― George Bernard Shaw

“After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. ”
― George Bernard Shaw, Overruled

“Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

“This is what being alive's all about, all those fucked up feelings. You've got to have them; when you stop, watch out.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

“Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, "Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?"

Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you're in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.... We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one's sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
― Anais Nin

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
― Marcel Proust

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
― Marcel Proust

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way”
― Marcel Proust

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
― Marcel Proust

“Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Chance favors the connected mind.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

“This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.”
― Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

“We can't stop here, this is bat country!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“To acquire knowledge, one must study;
but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”
― Marilyn vos Savant