Lesbia Quotes & Sayings

When Catullus expresses his love and hate for Lesbia, he is not obviously voicing a wish to rid himself of one or the other of these two sentiments. Not all contradictions resolve into temporal change of belief or desire. — Raymond Geuss

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, And though the sager sort our deeds reprove, Let us not weigh them. Heaven's great lamps do dive Into their west, and straight again revive, But soon as once set is our little light, Then must we sleep one ever-during night. See Catullus 200:5. — Thomas Campion

One of the first rules of police work is that trouble will always come looking for you, so there's no point looking for it. — Ben Aaronovitch

The body was so little a part of him that its final stillness seemed nothing of importance. He was half out of it anyway and death was only a slipping out of it altogether and being at last what he always was, a spirit. We buried the pearly shell upon the mountain top. — Pearl S. Buck

In fishing, golf and gardening, if you don't have a healthy tolerance for your own ineptitude, then it isn't for you. — William Bernard Ziff Jr.

Now I know that here is something higher than heaven and deeper than ocean and stranger than life and death and time. I know now what I did not know before. — Kahlil Gibran

In the quiet hours when we are alone and there is nobody to tell us what fine fellows we are, we come sometimes upon a moment in which we wonder, not how much money we are earning, nor how famous we have become, but what good we are doing. — A.A. Milne

We should live, my Lesbia, and love
And value all the talk of stricter
Old men at a single penny.
Suns can set and rise again;
For us, once our brief light has set,
There's one unending night for sleeping.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
Then another thousand, then a second hundred,
Then still another thousand, then a hundred;
Then, when we've made many thousands,
We'll muddle them so as not to know
Or lest some villain overlook us
Knowing the total of our kisses.
(Translated by Guy Lee) — Catullus

Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness
presently
Every bed is narrow. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

If God were a theory, the study of theology would be the way to understand Him. But God is alive and in need of love and worship. This is why thinking of God is related to our worship. In an analogy of artistic understanding, we sing to Him before we are able to understand Him. We have to love in order to know. Unless we learn how to sing, unless we know how to love, we will never learn to understand Him. — Abraham Joshua Heschel