Translator Quotes

Perfect happiness, by princes sought, Is not with birth born, nor exchequers bought.

Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.

Whittaker Chambers

The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.

A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print

Gregory Rabassa

Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.

August Wilhelm Schlegel

I'll be somewhere listening for my name.... You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

The Lord's appearing, His coming back, is a warning, an encouragement, and an incentive to us; we should love His appearing and look forward to it with earnest expectation and joy.

If man is part and parcel of the universe, and is ruled by the same laws as govern the sky, it is not unreasonable to search the heavens for the patterns of our lives, and for those impersonal attractions which induce our success and our errors.

Marguerite Yourcenar

What I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I think our lives are surely but the dreams
Of spirits, dwelling in the distant spheres,
Who as we die, do one by one awake.

The world has no hold on you. Whatever has a hold on you comes from your mind.

Red Pine (author)

The shadows of twilight grow,
And the tiger's ancient fierceness
In my veins begins to flow.

William Wetmore Story

I am naturally anti-Russian just as most Germans are. I admire their achievements in industrial fields. I was in Moscow personally. I would not be in favor of the Russian system in the western nations. I don't condemn the system — I recognize the good results that it has produced in its proper setting. But in order to be Communist, one must be a fanatic. I am very suspicious of all systems requiring fanaticism. I am convinced that the world would be a better place if people were satisfied with enough to eat and a job to keep them occupied.

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.

Rafael Sabatini

The air is full of a farewell- deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where the mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned

Humility means that one should not be anxious to have the satisfaction of being honored by others.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

There is no part of the whole course of our Saviour Christ's life or death, but it is well worthy our looking on; and from each part in it there goeth virtue to do us good.

Lancelot Andrewes

Like the best convenience store in the world, / the mind is always open.

The long-haired Yak has long black hair, He lets it grow — he doesn't care. He lets it grow and grow and grow, He lets it trail along the stair. Does he ever go to the barbershop? NO! How wild and woolly and devil-may-care A long-haired Yak with long black hair Would look when perched in a barber chair!

William Jay Smith

Some extreme optimists argue that North Koreans won't know how to mount the bombs on their missiles. Maybe, they have completed the H-bomb but haven't invented the screwdrivers and ropes yet.

The round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers. There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Czesław Miłosz

Now my soul is incarnate in my country,
My body has swallowed her soul,
And I and my country are one.
My name is million, for I love and suffer for millions.

Adam Mickiewicz

Ah fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee.

Christopher Marlowe