Willa Cather Quotes

I'm probably not one of the more vocal people around, but I do watch, I do listen and I try to learn from the people I watch.

How was it that Adrian Ivashkov, who never seemed to take anything seriously was the only one among these "responsible" people who paid attention to such small details? How was he the only one to really understand the magnitude of what I was feeling?

I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damn thing. It only leads to violence and pain.

Experience is knowledge; but knowledge, when it is sought only as a material resource, is not always a blessing. Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with those who lack vision, is not always power. Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, when it is induced by apathy, is not in the least a virtue.

Gideon knew exactly what I liked. Not because I’d told him, but because he paid attention to everything about me.

Wise is the man who does not disdain any character and instead, examining him with a searching look, plumbs him to the very main-springs of his being.

Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.

When you are suffering, you become more understanding about yourself, but also about other people's sufferings too. That's the first step to understand somebody is to understand their sufferings. So then love follows.

A compassionate heart will lift you out of the pain and suffering of your own world because it knows that everyone is doing the best they can, given their state of consciousness and the histories they're dragging behind them.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

If you have the support of people with a heart and a brain, then you're good.

Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.

Pain is the root of knowledge.

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

I am not learned, but I have as good feelings as any man.

I always feel that life can teach you how to act. I'm always looking at life through other people's eyes. By feeling empathy. And I do feel that I am constantly learning.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

People often ask me how I get so many unique experiences while they get none. I tell them the difference is in the sensitivity. I can observe those small emotions, which may look trivial to others.

Being stupid and compassionate are not conflicts. Being mean and being funny and having something to say are not a conflict.

I'd like people to think of me as someone who cares about them.

No one suffers so much as he [the genius] with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only "by suffering" that a man knows. If compassion is not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius understands men. And the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all; but he suffers most through his understanding. . . .

I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach.