Translation

Rainer Maria Rilke

Literature

Symbolism

1875–1926

"He was a poet and hated the approximate."

🇩🇪Friedrich Hölderlin

Philosophy

Idealism

1770–1843

"What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?"

George Eliot

Journalism

Realism

1819–1880

"when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy."

C. L. R. James

Literature

Marxism

1901–1989

"I do not want to get liberated from them . I would consider liberation from them a grievous loss, irreparable."

Helena Roerich

Philosophy

1879–1955

"Statues in honor of the Bodhisattva Maitreya were erected in India and Tibet at the very beginning of our Christian Era, and there is not a single Buddhist temple where there is not now an Image of this Bodhisattva."

🇬🇧Michael Frayn

Literature

b. 1933

"To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell."

"Ask yourself three questions and you will know who you are. Ask 'What do you believe in? What do you hope for? But most important - ask what do you love?"

🇫🇷Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Literature

1636–1711

"Let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace."

"In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the Greek world."

🇬🇧Christopher Fry

Literature

1907–2005

"Christopher Fry Obituary from The Telegraph"

🇬🇧Angela Carter

Literature

Realism

1940–1992

"A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters."

🇦🇷Alberto Manguel

Literature

b. 1948

"From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis."

🇫🇷Prosper Mérimée

Music

Romanticism

1803–1870

"I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles."

Cesare Pavese

Literature

1908–1950

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

Lu Xun

Literature

New Culture Movement

1881–1936

"We have hereafter only two roads to choose: one is to embrace the ancient literature and die, the other is to forsake the ancient literature and live."

John Ogilby

Business

1600–1676

"Begin, sweet Babe, with smiles thy Mother know."

🇺🇸Marguerite Yourcenar

Literature

1903–1987

"Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be."

🇦🇹Martin Buber

Philosophy

Existentialism

1878–1965

"Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power."

🇩🇪Gustav Landauer

Philosophy

Materialism

1870–1919

"Anarchy is not a matter of the future; it is a matter of the present. It is not a matter of making demands; it is a matter of how one lives."

🇮🇳Govind Chandra Pande

Philosophy

1923–2011

"It may be concluded that Sankara accepts Yoga as a practical discipline for the realization of Truth and sees no contradiction between Yoga and Vedanta."

🇷🇺Osip Mandelstam

Literature

Acmeist poetry

1891–1938

"Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

Gu Hongming

Literature

1857–1928

"The serene and blessed mood which enables us to see into the life of things: that is imaginative reason, that is the Spirit of the Chinese People."

🇺🇸George Bancroft

Politics

1800–1891

"George Bancroft Papers, 1823-1890 - Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library"

Ernest Dowson

Literature

1867–1900

"I understand that absinthe makes the tart grow fonder."