Puck's Quote Board, page 21
Boasting 1613 quotes!
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What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, carving from time an emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is begotten in the mind’s ability to sculpt the sensorial domain. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that’s like you thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it’s a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood… Where I’m concerned, just seeing my mother shooting up with her anti-depressants and sleeping tablets has been enough to inoculate me for life against that sort of substance abuse. Lastly, teenagers think that they’re adults when in fact they’re imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life. It’s pathetic.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There’s so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature… yes, that’s it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are – vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth – and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know how to build the present, and when you don’t know how to build the present, you can tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see?
So we mustn’t forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or to be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:46 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:40 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which convey the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and elicit a spatiotemporal dimension free of any striving for beauty, creative angst or the never-ending and hopeless aspiration to attain the sublime.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We are all prisoners of our own destiny, must confront it with the knowledge that there is no way out and, in our epilogue, must be the person we have always been deep inside, regardless of any illusions we may have nurtured in our lifetime.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 23 Jun 2009 at 7:47 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent, condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things – some sort of balancing of the scales offered by nature to those less favored among her children – no, it is a superfluous plaything that exists only to enhance the value of a jewel. As for ugliness, it is guilty from the start, and I was doomed by my tragic destiny to suffer all the more, for I was hardly stupid.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 23 Jun 2009 at 7:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as though they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them – all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 23 Jun 2009 at 7:03 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
No one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It’s just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 23 Jun 2009 at 6:58 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If the paradoxes I have gathered on these pages have on recurring theme, it is the folly of denying ignorance. Just because something is so doesn’t mean that we can know it. There is necessary ignorance, and it is more significant than mere solipsism would have us believe.
Speaker: William PoundstoneSource: Labyrinths of ReasonPosted: 15 Jun 2009 at 4:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponent and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Speaker: Max PlanckSource: Labyrinths of ReasonPosted: 15 Jun 2009 at 4:37 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
Speaker: Theodore RooseveltPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The greatest discovery of our time is that man can change his environment by changing his attitude.
Speaker: William JamesPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The force of character is cumulative. All the forgone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of heroes? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed their united light on the advancing actor. He is attended by a visible escort of angels.
Speaker: Ralph Waldo EmersonPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The height of great men reached and kept
Were not obtained by sudden flight;
But while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night.Speaker: Ralph Waldo EmersonPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:45 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A man can succeed at almost anything when he has unlimited enthusiasm.
Speaker: AnonymousPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:44 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
Speaker: AnonymousPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:44 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Some who profess to long for immortality do not even know what to do with a single rainy afternoon.
Speaker: AnonymousPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:43 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I believe that one of the greatest sins of which the inhabitants of the earth are guilty today is the sin of ingratitude.
Speaker: Joseph SmithPosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:43 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!