Pablo Neruda Quotes

The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

Everything was good. But it was awful, too.

How much I love every thing that is decided and open!

The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.

There is a smile of love, And there is a smile of deceit, And there is a smile of smiles In which these two smiles meet.

One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.

So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

I'll just take amusement at being a paradox.

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

Either is both, and Both is neither.

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

People are weird. We do live on all levels at the same time and you can be fighting and flirting, and there can be fury and sexual tension. All that stuff can co-exist so it's just a testament to how complex we are. Or maybe it's a testament to how boringly we try and simplify everything.

She had the power to destroy. I had only seen the power to love. When you discovered both, who could figure out what to do with that?

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.

I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don't think it's one motion unfortunately - I wish we could say it's better, better, better - but I think it's better, bad, better, bad - you know?

There is always the other side, always.

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.

The world is full of contradiction.