Ralph Mannheim Translation Quotes

But when you are week the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you're still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.
That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you'll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

The nights in Billancourt were soft and sweet, enlivened now and again by those childish airplane or zeppelin alarms which provided the civilian population with thrills and self-justification. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

There is something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't ever try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they're bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again. Maybe I'll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn't snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you're really in despair. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it's indispensable. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Pleased at having proclaimed these useful truths, we sat looking at the ladies in the café. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that's him, our master. Come, kiss me. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn't go any futrther because of the ocean. That's France, that's the French people. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

The coldest most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Take your mind off the problems for a moment, and focus on the positive possibilities. Consider how very much you are able to do. ~ Ralph Marston

There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We say that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man's idea of God, and a God's collusion, is an essential part of the equation to wage war. ~ Ralph Steadman

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The networks are not some chicken-coop manufacturing lobby whose calls nobody returns. ~ Ralph Nader

There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first lesson of history is that evil is good. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The years teach much the days never know. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The church that is married to the spirit of this age, becomes a widow in the next. ~ William Ralph Inge

A real translation is transparent. ~ Walter Benjamin

The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you. ~ Story Musgrave

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You remember the Latin?"
"Of course. Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit." I couldn't see his face. Cease of the hood, but it could tell by the tone of his voice that he was completely serious. Or at least trying to be. I wrinkled my forehead as I attempted to translate.
"Wait a second," Seth said, pulling back his hood to demonstrate his utter confusion. "I thought their greeting was Non ducor, duco. 'I am not led, I lead.'"
Liam's shoulders began shaking just as I finished my rough translation. "A wise man does not urinate against the wind?" I pulled down my hood and looked at Liam. He winked at me, and it was pretty much the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. Normally, I'm very anti-wink when it comes to guys, but in this case it was a wink of absolution. It was a wink that meant Liam and I were actually going to be okay.
"You've been planning that all night, haven't you?" I reached over and squeezed his arm. It was the first time I had touched him in at least twenty-four hours, and his strong forearm felt so good beneath my fingertips. When he grabbed my hand and quickly brought my palm to his lips, I felt all the air leave my body. As much as I hated to admit it, for fear of sounding like a ridiculous, boy-crazed damsel in distress, it felt good to have my boyfriend back.
Taylor whipped back her hood, her blue eyes icy. "I'm so glad this is such a joke to you," she spat, clearly not in the mood for games.
Liam dropped my hand ~ Lisa Roecker

Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and reveal its potencies ~ Rikki Ducornet

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face. ~ Karl Mannheim

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I didn't paint my paintings to hang in some rich guy's living room, ~ Ralph Fasanella

The laws of light and of heat translate each other;-so do the laws of sound and colour; and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech. ~ Ralph Ellison

A man has no more character than he can command in a time of crisis. ~ Ralph W. Sockman

W-MT: There was a book I read about in the New York Times Book Review. It had a red cover, maybe? A.J.: Yeah, that sounds familiar. [Translation: That is excessively vague. Author, title, description of the plot - these are more useful locators. That the cover might have been red and that it was in the New York Times Book Review helps me far less than you might think.] Anything else you remember about it? [Use your words.] ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.' ~ Ralph Ellison

Before the reward there must be labor. You plant before you harvest. You sow in tears before you reap joy. ~ Ralph Ransom

I like people who can do things ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse. ~ Ralph Nader

...it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language...So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew... ~ Rachel Cusk

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personalrelations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is the most unbending and uncompliable, the most necessary, firm, immutable, and adamantine thing in the world. ~ Ralph Cudworth

My life is not an apology, but a life. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intemperance is the only vulgarity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson