Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre Quotes

“Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.”

“If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.”

“If the apperance doesn't scare you look out for the mind . If that doesn't nothing will .”

“Hey, it's not a problem," she says, still smiling at me. "If you feel bad about it, pay me in cocoa and I'll do it with you all night if you want."Craig bursts out laughing and Maria looks up at him confused. I groan and press my face into my good hand. Even in college, we're still just a bunch of children sometimes."What's so... eew!" gasps Maria as she finally gets it. Her face turns red as she covers her mouth with her hands to stifle her giggling.”

“I think it was then that it dawned on me that Mum wasn't going to notice Chris was missing. She has been made so that she thinks Chris is just round the corner all the time. She doesn't realise that she never sees him. I don't know why I didn't understand earlier. If Aunt Maria can turn Chris into a wolf, she's surely strong enough to do this to Mum- except that it seems a different kind of thing, much more natural and ordinary, and I didn't really think she could do both kinds.”

“Levi," Maria called. "Come back. We're not finished yet."He paused"What, Maria?""You asked me what I believe in? I believed in you."He nodded his head sadly. "Yes, you did. And before you met me, you believed in nothing. But that's the thing with belief, Maria. It's easy to believe in something when it doesn't require anything from you. It's much harder, though, when the object of your belief requires something of you or asks for something you don't want to give. That's when real belief occurs.”

“If anything at all, perfection is not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

“If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.”

“Books are left untouched. Fanaticism became our trait.. Now more than ever we let others feed our minds and we became the zombie society walking around without purpose, without care, without vision.”

“If your love for […] wants to do something now, then its work and task is this: to catch up with what it has missed. For it has failed to see whither this person has gone, it has failed to accompany her in her broadest development, it has failed to spread itself out over the new distances this person embraces, and it hasn’t ceased looking for her at a certain point in her growth, it wants obstinately to hold fast to a definite beauty beyond which she has passed, instead of persevering, confident of new shared beauties to come.”—from letter to Paula Modersohn-Becker Bremen (February 12, 1902)”