The quote database

My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life.

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.

Whatever moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark, and that touch is my reality.

The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel.

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion which lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

do not hope to excite love except by love

Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.

To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing.

Courage returns as we gaze; when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can be again.

Love at its highest point--love sublime, unique, invincible--leads us straight to the brink of the great abyss, for it speaks to us directly of the infinite and of eternity.

Man is only what he becomes--profound truth; but he becomes only what he is, truth still more profound.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

To sleep is to strain and purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of life, to calm the fever of the soul

The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life.

depend upon it, you will love your native hills the better for being separated from them

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!

Tell all my friends in Concord that I do not send my love, but retain it still.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

My saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets.

The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference.

Methinks, if I loved him more, I should keep him--I should keep myself rather--at a more respectful distance.