Jacquou Le Quotes

Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge ome trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought. ~ Blaise Pascal

It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly. ~ John Le Carre

The Armorys of this world don't steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else's. So there's another god for you that's passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Armory's religion. (ch. 14) ~ John Le Carre

If I held all the thoughts of the world in my hand, I would be careful not to open it. ~ Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

The opening ceremony was good, although I missed it. ~ Graeme Le Saux

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British. ~ John Le Carre

I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. ~ Richard Le Gallienne

I'm probably not smart enough to appreciate all your glory. Must be because of my genes. Yes, I'm definitely struggling to appreciate it right now. ~ Jamie Le Fay

He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow "sleeping clothes" into the "trash" bin. Shevek puased, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty.
"The clothes are burned?"
Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue- wear 'em and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning."
"It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively. He sad the words the way a paleontontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that date a whole stratum. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In my speeches, I always condemned communism, national-socialism and fascism. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Every age, and especially our own, stands in need of a Diogenes; but the difficulty is in finding men who have the courage to be one, and men who have the patience to endure one. ~ Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? His ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella - I think it was because Stella didn't want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That's what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them. ~ John Le Carre

After a foreign invasion, there has to be a sort of feeling of musical inadequacy in the country. ~ Simon Le Bon

So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.
We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom ... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples ... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought ... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation. ~ Gustave Le Bon

Well, this. That we're ashamed to say we've refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate - we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he's a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. Tir never did that I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian - a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality, the truth which I recognise in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness - that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's not a real place, or a place that you can stay for long; it's a somewhere-over-the-rainbow archetype but rooted in genuine emotions. No matter what Guests' care might be, when they step onto Main Street they enter an evocation of the ideal home town. This is, in a sense, the 'home' to which Dorothy Gale wanted to return. Main Street welcomes all Guests with warmth as comforting today as it was to the post-war society of the 1950's for which it was originally created. ~ Leslie Le Mon

About forty miles away from Paris, I began to see the old trench flares they were sending up at Le Bourget. I knew then I had made it, and as I approached the field with all its lights, it was a simple matter to circle once and then pick a spot sufficiently far away from the crowd to land O.K. ~ Charles Lindbergh

I had been playing Shostakovich on the stereo, but without conviction. ~ John Le Carre

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. ~ John Le Carre

[...]falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might have a closer look at the shelves.I had to content myself instead with a strolling perusal, my hands locked behind my back to keep them from reaching out for Le Morte D'Arthur, Caxton 1485 or the delicious little red-and-gilt Bestiary, MS Circa 1250 or ... If I took one down, I should be lost. So I looked, like a hungry child in a sweet shop, and trailed out on my guide's heels with one longing backward glance. ~ Laurie R. King

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. [...] Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. "Vengeance ! Vengeance" was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.
And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. [...] Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands. ~ C.L.R. James

Dreams take short cuts. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight. ~ William S. Burroughs

Many people make their own God; and he is much what the French may mean when they talk of le bon Dieu,
very indulgent, rather weak, near at hand when we want anything, but far away out of sight when we have a mind to do wrong. Such a God is as much an idol as if he were an image of stone. ~ Julius Charles Hare

I think that all writers feel alienated ... I know that I do ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated. ~ John Le Carre

What would she say to Lord le Wyse? I love you? I've wanted to kiss you for weeks? She almost laughed. Obviously she was hysterical. ~ Melanie Dickerson

I did not know till now how irresolute a character was mine. ~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

If you play against your own side you'll lose the whole game. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."

("The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.")

[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867] ~ George Sand

The truth hurts because it's the shit that everyone kept from you. ~ Kate Le Vann

Words are taking their revenge. One day, they break the seals of the phylacteries, and come swarming out like snakes. Another day, they spurt from the labels of the bottles that had held them prisoner, and spread through the black sky with their pterodactyl-like jaws thrust forward like a saw-blade knife. They sweep straight ahead, and as they kill their masters their cries of vengeance can be heard. ~ J M G Le Clezio

In many college English courses the words "myth" and "symbol" are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain't no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that's how Melville did it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon.

Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin