Quotes on Ifs

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

How long do you remember that it is the Lord who is making you work? But then, by repeatedly analysing like that, you will come to a state when the ego will vanish and in its place the Lord will come in. Then you will be able to say with justice "Thou, Lord, art guarding all my actions from within." But, my friend, if the ego occupies all the space within your heart, where forsooth will there be room enough for the Lord to come in? The Lord is verily absent!

What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.

It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

As a young person, and I know it’s hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn’t do normally if I was just by myself.

If I paid ten dollars for a cigar, first I'd make love to it, then I'd smoke it.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Life is a place where it is necessary to move gently. Whether it be in thought, speech, or action, the rhythm must be controlled; the law of harmony must be observed in all that one does. If there is anything that will bring satisfaction it is diving deep into Love, and then we shall realize that there is nothing which is not just; we shall never again say that anything is unjust. This is the point the wise reach, and they call it the culmination of wisdom.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn't feel that, I don't think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn't really see the point.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

But truly, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.