A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else. — © Vladimir Nabokov
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is.
In Japan we have the phrase, "Shoshin," which means "beginner's mind." Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.
Finding something important in life does not mean that you must give up everything else.
Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.
The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.
There's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite.
I think that every day is a learning experience. I mean, every time I go to a school I learn something else from a teacher or learn something else from a student, I learn something else from a parent. There's so much to know when you talk about education.
You can give joyfully only when you have found something so valuable within yourself that everything else does not mean so much to you anymore.
So, yeah, I mean, there is something universal about that feeling - that 20-something, what the hell am I going to do with my life, I'm lost and my parents are freaking me out, and what's the point? Every generation has a way of making that unique, but there are certain universals of that feeling.
I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.
How can non-existence get sick of itself? Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
I've taken a lot of pride in that, and not feeling any pressure to yield or to bend to what someone else's imagination of who I should be is. I'm grateful for that, and I still want to continue to do that. It can sound cliche, 'be true to yourself,' but that does mean something.
By a tranquil mind I mean nothing else than a mind well ordered.
Brigan was saying her name, and he was sending her a feeling. It was courage and strength, and something else too, as if he were standing with her, as if he'd taken her within himself, letting her rest her entire body for a moment on his backbone, her mind in his mind, her heart in the fire of his. The fire of Brigan's heart was astounding. Fire understood, and almost could not believe, that the feeling he was sending her was love.
Everything is always coming from something else. Even if you create something, it has to be inspired by something else. If you think of Apple and Steve Jobs, he had to be inspired by something that launched the ideas in his head.
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