Quotes About Restraint

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

The less we parade our misfortunes the more sympathy we command.

I recognized exactly where she was—that state where you're able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy.

When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.

Being able to restrain my emotions isn't a great victory—it's the pitiful proof of lost love.

I tried to keep very still, but my heart felt like crickets scratching to get out of the cage.

But in art, lovely subversive art, you see what breaks through in spite of restraint, or even because of it. Art despises placidity and smooth surfaces. Without art, I would have drowned under still waters.

Nankingis on lumi nagu kõrge ametnik - ei käi liiga tihti, ei jää liiga kaukas

But why didn't I flood in the same way? Why was their happiness tenfold what I felt? Did I lack the proper connection between the senses and the heart? And then I realized that this was my habit. To hold back my feelings.

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have... excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse's, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

Perhaps I should not tell him the dream. It puts me in his hands, it is giving him too much

I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

We must avoid possession, he said. But, oh, let me kiss you.

I will be the one woman you will never have . . . excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

But I am not free. I am incapable of destruction.

Don't tear anything up: it creates blanks, silences—like the dashes of [Paul] Valéry.

C'était une âme et un corps où n'entrait jamais l'aiguillon.

Les âmes semblables à la sienne se croient perdues, dès qu'elles ne sentent plus auprès d'elles tuteurs, rampes et garde-fous. De plus elles tolèrent mal chez autrui une liberté qu'elles résignent, et souhaitent d'obtenir par contrainte tout ce qu'on est prêt à leur accorder par amour.

Caution has always ruled your kind. You depend upon the sanctity of locks—thus, what is prisoned by one man may be freed by another.

I have a certain ruthless objectivity not uncommon among those who live inside the senses; I love him without restraint, without limit, without respect to consequences, for me or for him; I am not sentimental; I want him; this is not dopey, stupid, sentimental love; nostalgia and lingering romance; this is it; all; everything.

It is not good to have TOO MUCH of anything.

No matter how unjustly you've been treated, if you start fighting fire with fire, you'll get burned.

She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.