Top 74 Jan-Philipp Sendker Quotes
#2. My bees cannot sting." "You mean they haven't stung anyone yet." "Is there a difference?" "What do you do with the honey?" "What honey?" "From the bees." U Ba looked at me. "I wouldn't touch it. It belongs to the bees.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#4. It's love. Love makes us beautiful. Do you know a single person who loves and is loved, who is loved unconditionally and who, at the same time, is ugly? There's no need to ponder the question.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#5. Anyone who has been the victim of violence carries that violence inside himself. Anyone
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#6. We are responsible not only for what we do, but also for what we fail to do.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#8. There are moments that we simply cannot endure. They transform us into someone else.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#9. Images can fade. Sounds and smells disappear from our memory. But our heart forgets nothing. A child's soul knows everything.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#10. How can a person be moved to tears by something she can neither see, understand, nor hold on to, a mere sound that vanishes almost the moment it comes into being?
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#12. In a sooty kettle. In one corner, orange-colored sodas were stacked in wooden crates. I had never been in such a wretched hovel.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#13. The world was full of signs. One needed only to know how to see and interpret them.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#14. Is it true that we can count the moments in which something really happens in our lives? Do we notice it right away, or only in hindsight?
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#15. Then the animals began to sing. First the crocodiles.
But crocodiles can't sing, I objected at this point every evening.
Sure they can, answers my father very quietly. Crocodiles sing, if only you let them. You just have to be quiet to hear them.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#16. We believe that we see the world around us, and yet it is only the surface that we perceive.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#17. I told him I had no use for introspection and navel-gazing. I was probably one of the few New Yorkers who had never been to a therapist. I was not the type to go looking for the causes of all my problems in my childhood, and I had no respect for those who did.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#18. Themes so vast that only composers could even approach them. If at all. All other artists must practice humility before them.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#20. Not all truths are explicable, Julia," he said. "And not all explicable things are true.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#23. Because we see only what we already know. We project our own capacities - for good as well as evil - onto the other person.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#25. Besides, I have no point of comparison," he declared, his eyes still closed. "That is the secret of a happy life.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#26. Laughter has many meanings here. We laugh when something is unpleasant. When we are afraid. When we are angry." "Is it a kind of
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#27. Yet she also longed for moments when she might be weak, when she need not prove anything to anyone.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#28. We are not condemned to remain who we are. No one can help us do this but ourselves.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#30. Can words sprout wings? Can they glide like butterflies through the air? Can they captivate us, carry us off into another world? Can they open the last secret chambers of our souls?
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#31. Do you know a single person who loves and is loved, who is loved unconditionally and who, at the same time, is ugly? There's no need to ponder the question. There is no such person. He
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#32. There was the world of the sick and dying and the world of the hale. The healthy and hale did not want to know anything about the sick and dying.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#33. He expected nothing more from life. Not because he was disappointed or embittered. He expected nothing because there was nothing of importance that he had not already experienced. He possessed all the happiness that a person could find. He loved and was loved. Unconditionally.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#34. She hoped Tin Win would learn what she had learned over the years: that there were wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them to manageable size.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#37. Eyes and ears are not the problem ... It is rage that blinds and deafens us. Or fear. Envy, mistrust. The world contracts, gets all out of joint when you are angry or afraid.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#38. In the hell of the well-intentioned. That was how he referred to the charity balls my mother helped organize.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#39. [He taught her] that life is interwoven with suffering. That in every life, without exception, illnesses are unavoidable. That we will age, and that we cannot elude death. These are the laws and conditions of human existence.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#40. What do violent individuals fear most? Violence? I should say not! By what do the cruel and selfish feel most threatened? All of them fear nothing as much as they fear love.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#42. HOW THIN IS the wall between us and madness? No one knows what it is made
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#43. Only once had she asked the question: Why? And she had known that there would never be an answer. Her feet were a whim of nature. It would have been silly to look for causes or to rebel. She would not bicker with fate. Still, it hurt.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#44. THERE must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#45. Hearts sounded different from person to person, betraying age or youth, joy, sorrow, fear, or courage, but that was all.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#46. To forgive, one must love and be loved. Only those who forgive can be free. Whoever forgives is a prisoner no more.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#47. Life, U May told her, is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail. The monastery itself was surrounded
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#48. It's true I lost my eyesight many years ago. But that doesn't mean I'm blind.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#49. According to her we are each our own greatest mystery, and our life's work is to solve ourselves. None of us ever succeeds, she says, but it is our duty to follow the trail. Regardless of how long it is or where it might
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#50. When we get over something, we move on, we put it behind us. Do we leave the dead behind or do we take them with us? I think we take them with us. They accompany us. They remain with us, if in another form. We have to learn to live with them and their deaths.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#51. How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they're not prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#52. Fear blinds and deafens. Rage blinds and deafens. So, too, envy and suspicion. There was only one force stronger than fear.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#55. Loneliness is the most severe punishment. We are not built to handle it. I
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#57. We often discover only many years later whether life and the stars were smiling upon us or not. Life can take the most surprising turns. What
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#58. The fear of death is presumably a survival instinct, Tin Win later thought. It must be an essential part of us, of every living creature. At the same time, we must transcend it to take our leave in peace. He found this an irresolvable contradiction.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#59. I found this butterfly dead on our porch a few weeks ago. I have pressed it. It's one of those whose wing beats you loved best. You once said it reminded you of my heartbeat. None sounded sweeter.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#60. Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#61. The essence of a thing is invisible to the eye, U May said. Learn to perceive the essence of a thing. Eyes are more likely to hinder you in that regard. They distract us. We love to be dazzled.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#62. Were there people who simply did not belong together? Who loved each other, but who were nevertheless happier when they were apart? Certainly
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#63. There is nothing, for good or for evil, of which a person is incapable.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#64. She saw that he knew what loneliness was, that he understood why it might be raining inside a person even when the sun shone, that sadness needed no immediate cause.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#65. She had never witnessed such a symbiosis between two people, and there were moments when the sight of them made her wonder whether, in the end, a person maybe wasn't alone after all, whether in some cases, the smallest human unit was two rather than one.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#66. Anyone who has been betrayed carries that betrayal inside himself. How
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#67. She was mystified by people who were always hurrying things along. A time of waiting offered moments, minutes, sometimes even hours of peace, of rest, during which, as a rule, she was alone with herself.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#68. She hoped that Tin Win would learn what she had learned over the years: that there are wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them to a manageable size.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#69. And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know ceases to exist. A moment that transform us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#70. Life is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#71. By how many people must we be loved in order to be happy? Two? Five? Ten? Or maybe only one? The one who gives us sight. Who takes away fear. Who breathes meaning into our existence. There
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#72. We project our own capacities - for good as well as evil - onto the other person. Then we acknowledge as love primarily those things that correspond to our own image thereof.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#73. Every life contains the seed of death, he had explained to Tin Win repeatedly in those first years of their friendship. Death, like birth, was a part of life that no one could escape. It was senseless to resist it. Far better to accept it as natural than to fear it.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#74. THERE ARE MEMORIES we cannot escape. We take them with us wherever we go, however far, like it or not. They pursue us or accompany us in good times and in bad. We smell their scents. We hear their sounds. We delight in them or dread them. By day and by night. My
Jan-Philipp Sendker
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