Browsing Quotes, page 43
-
“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road.”
Speaker: "A Wise Person"Source: Happiness: 3 amazing tips from the world's oldest case study, by Yeah Dave (David Romanelli)Posted: 27 Jun 2009 at 8:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas. I spoke with a young doctoral candidate in Greek patristics and wondered how so much youth could be squandered in the service of nothingness. When you consider that a primate’s major preoccupations are sex, territory and hierarchy, spending one’s time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise.
To be sure, there are those who will argue that mankind aspires to meaning beyond mere impulses. But I would counter that while this is certainly true (otherwise, what am I to do with literature?), it is also utterly false: meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement, in that it uses the most effective means – understanding – to attain its goals. For the quest for meaning abd beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon in the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject, this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlety of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at our disposal.Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:12 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Those who seek eternity find solitude
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:05 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! it carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the ever, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where – even though tomorrow we will die – we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring… We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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! -
Ce n’est pas parce que les choses sont difficiles que nous n’osons pas, c’est parce que nous n’osons pas qu’elles sont difficiles.
Speaker: SénèquePosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 4:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.
Posted: 24 Jun 2009 at 2:31 PMComments: 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! -
The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.
Speaker: Arnold H. GlasgowPosted: 16 Jun 2009 at 8:30 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I’ll never try to fit in
I was born to stand outSpeaker: AnonomyousSource: myhotcomments.comPosted: 16 Jun 2009 at 12:16 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so you can learn to let go. Things go wrong so that you can appreciate them when there right you believe lies so eventually you learn to trust no one but your self, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. People change and things go wrong but always remember life goes on.
Speaker: Marilyn MonroeSource: myhotcomments.comPosted: 16 Jun 2009 at 12:07 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I’ve made mistakes in my life.
I’ve let people take advantage of me,
and I accepted way less that I deserve.
But, I learned from my bad choices and
even though there are some things I can never
get back and people who will never be sorry,
I’ll know better next time and
I won’t settle for anything less than I deserveSpeaker: AnonomyousSource: myhotcomments.comPosted: 16 Jun 2009 at 11:46 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!
- ‹
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- 114
- 115
- 116
- 117
- 118
- 119
- 120
- 121
- 122
- 123
- 124
- 125
- 126
- ›