Victor Fernando R Ocampo Quotes

With a combination of proper lighting and climate control he managed to achieve a different ecological niche in each gallery. In the African section, where the imbrications of Augustine, Mafouz and Okri lay decomposing, he grew sorghum and Dioscorea yams. In the Chinese gallery where the Tao Te Ching and countless Confucian annotations moldered, he grew rice, crab apples and barley. Over the poems of Neruda and Borges himself, he grew potatoes. Each plant in this new Eden he lovingly tainted with the virus of civilization

- from the short story "Resurrection ~ Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

Mahirap ngayon ang educational system. They're out for the degree, not knowledge. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

If there was anyone ma-porma during the Fil-American War, it was Heneral Goyo. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

Sometimes it pays not to be interested in what happened but in what did not happen. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

History is part of our birthright. We must claim it back and make it transform our lives ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

Once upon a time
There was a friend
Who poured some ink
To a pen, which had been dried up

Since then
There are pages, and books
Cluttered by scribbling
With or without a meaning

When the ink was done
Scribbling started
In the earth, dust covered
In the tranquil grounds of the temple
And in the naked skies
Among floating clouds

Mesmerized by the dawn of love
On top of mountains
Like a fairy spreading her wings
On fluttering wings of butterflies
In paths, under the starry skies
On piano keys, playing without a tune
On sprays of vibrant blooms
Even without a sweet fragrance

Even among the debris, pungent
flowing down the drain
Among the eyes filled with emptiness
Walking down the streets,
In the battle field, drenched with blood
Waiting for a flying bullet, which brings death….

There is a poem
Each and every moment
Each and every day!

(Translated by Manel K R Fernando) ~ Shasika Amali Munasinghe

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country? ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

Doreen Fernandez' foreword to "Rizal Without the Overcoat":
His essays remind us that history need not and should not be relegated to schoolbooks and classrooms, where it often becomes a set of names and dates to memorize and spew out on test papers. History is a living and lively account of what we were and are; it could and should be as real to each of us as stories about family or about recent and past events.. If all of that makes us understand humanity better, so does history make us understand ourselves, and our country infinitely better, in the context of our culture and our society. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

Filipinos have an aversion to blank walls. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

Even a quick reading of Rizal's trial will prove that those who take Constantino's works uncritically are likewise guilty of "Veneration Without Understanding." Since there is so much fiction and faction in history it is always essential to return to the sources. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

It is ironic that many Filipinos learn to love the Philippines while abroad, not at home. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

I guess if you go around with famous people you are assured of some reflected (or deflected) glory. ~ Ambeth R. Ocampo

To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment. ~ Victor Hugo

The shutdown may have temporarily sidetracked the Republicans, yet Obamacare threatens much worse for the Democrats. By 2014 the former will be ancient history, while the latter will be an ongoing mess. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths. ~ Victor Hugo

A philosopher is a mathematician, who might not be good at solving mathematical problems but knows 'which one' to solve and 'why' to solve it... ~ Victor Ghoshe

But the work of the wise is one thing and the work of the merely clever is another. ~ Victor Hugo

Because of my experience in Desert Storm I have permanent Insomnia but don't get me wrong I love sleep I can never get enough of it. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living? ~ Fernando Pessoa

This will destroy that. The book will kill the edifice. ~ Victor Hugo

The shame wasn't in discovering that she had a price; everyone had one of those. Maybe it was just in learning, so concretely, that this was what she cost. ~ Victor LaValle

Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people ~ Victor Hugo

The warehouse cat was always the aggressor, while the attic cat was ultimately the victor, just as in politics. ~ Anne Frank

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter. ~ Victor Hugo

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings. ~ Victor Hugo

The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the rest. For Cosette laughed now. ~ Victor Hugo

CHAPTER VIII - PHILOSOPHY AFTER DRINKING ~ Victor Hugo

To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second. ~ Fernando J. Corbato

Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes. ~ Victor Hugo

A disdain full of disgust for those who don't realize that the only reality is each man's soul, and that everything else - the exterior world and other people - is but an unaesthetic nightmare ~ Fernando Pessoa

Humanitarianism is rude. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child ~ Victor LaValle

The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. In was in that quarter, quia multum amavit, - because he loved much - that he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of D - - had none of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect, deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This revery sometimes caused him ~ Victor Hugo

I have no philosophy, I have senses ...
If I speak of Nature it's not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.
To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think . ~ Fernando Pessoa

Purpose without virtue is vanity. ~ Fernando Torres

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use. ~ Victor Hugo

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of. ~ Victor Hugo

Jaguars, afterall, were fairly common, and so people were more respectful than afraid of them, just as they were of any other natural force. ~ Victor Villasenor

To love, or to have loved, - this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfilment ~ Victor Hugo

The eye of the spirit can nowhere find more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul.

To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants, like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his brain and the actions of his life! ~ Victor Hugo

Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.' We must suppose that is what he said to himself. ~ Victor Hugo

I was captain in Atletico at 19, playing in the same team as Demetrio Albertini, who won three Champions Leagues, and Sergi Barjuan from Barcelona, who had won everything, and they were 32, 33. I was a kid as captain, so I wasn't the real captain, just a kid learning from them. ~ Fernando Torres

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas. ~ Victor Hugo

All animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. ~ Victor Hugo

Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used; it allays the sometimes virulent fever of the over-active mind, like a cool wind blowing through the brain to smooth the harshness of untrammelled thought; it bridges here and there the gaps, brings things into proportion and blunts the sharper angles. But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of nourishment. ~ Victor Hugo

That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history and daylight have arrived.
That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader. Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar, Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form. ~ Victor Hugo

Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I'm sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or where I am. ~ Fernando Pessoa