..life is just that... a dream and a fear *

Yannis Stavrou, Evening at the Port, oil on canvas

A great writer / artist

*Joseph Conrad / Quotes

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

God is for men and religion is for women.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word.

The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself.

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the shadow.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

It is respectable to have no illusions - and safe - and profitable, and dull.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still...

For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and the human race come to an end.

It's queer how out of touch with the truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.

the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual...

Yannis Stavrou, Green Apples, oil on canvas

Quotes By Paracelsus (1493 - 1541)

If we want to make a statement about a man's nature on the basis of his physiognomy, we must take everything into account; it is in his distress that a man is tested, for then his nature is revealed.

Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.

Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics.

Often the remedy is deemed the highest good because it helps so many.

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

The dose makes the poison.

The physician must give heed to the region in which the patient lives, that is to say, to its type and peculiarities.

Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.

We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.

What sense would it make or what would it benfit a physician if he discovered the origin of the diseases but could not cure or alleviate them?

What the eyes perceive in herbs or stones or trees is not yet a remedy; the eyes see only the dross.

Quotes by Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.

Quotes by Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630)

I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.

The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.

The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Quotes by Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601)

I conclude, therefore, that this star is not some kind of comet or a fiery meteor... but that it is a star shining in the firmament itself one that has never previously been seen before our time, in any age since the beginning of the world.

It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.

When, according to habit, I was contemplating the stars in a clear sky, I noticed a new and unusual star, surpassing the other stars in brilliancy. There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.

With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above, and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.

Quotes by Thomas Browne (1605 - 1682)

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.

Death is the cure for all diseases.

Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them.

It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million faces, there should be none alike.

It is we that are blind, not fortune.

Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.

Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere philosophy.

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven *

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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* William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven
* On the left, Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas (detail)