Quotes by Authors - X, Y & Z

Xenophanes

But if cows or horses or lions had hands
or could draw with their hands and make the things men can make,
then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses,
cows like cows, and they would make their bodies
similar in shape to those which each had themselves.

William Butler Yeats

How many have loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement.
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with a passionate intensity.

Anzia Yenerska

Was she so loved because her eyes were so beautiful, or were her eyes so beautiful because she was so loved?

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Yiddish Proverbs

A man should live if only to satisfy his curiosity.

God gave burdens, also shoulders.

Hope for miracles, but don't rely on one.

If all pulled in one direction, the world would keel over.

A half truth is a whole lie.

If I try to be like him, who will be like me?

Too humble is half proud.

When one must, one can.

Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back

Do or do not. There is no 'try'.

Lin Yutang

(from The Importance of Living) ...And I must confess to a secret partiality for the one who dreams. Generally, he is the sadder one, but no matter; he is also capable of greater joys and thrills and heights of ecstasy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

Israel Zangwill

In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of the grand passion than of a grand opera.

Emilio Zapata

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!

Mao Zedong

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

Roger Zelazny

(Siddartha, from Lord of Light) ...'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming.

Robert Zend

There are too many people, and too few human beings.

Ed Zern, book review in Field & Stream, November 1959

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's 'Practical Gamekeeping.'

Emile Zola

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: "I am here to live out loud."

Zoroaster

Taking the first footstep with a good thought, the second with a good word, and the third with a good deed, I entered paradise.

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