A self-portrait in quotations

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.‎

Peter McWilliams

Enjoy each moment. Appreciate what is. Be completely here and now. That is where eternity is found.

J.G. Gorton

I am always prepared to recognize that there can be two points of view- mine, and one that is probably wrong.

Gerald Brenan

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

Seneca

What you think of yourself is much more important than what others think of you. 

Lee Marvin 

One of the good things about getting older is that you find you’re more interesting than most of the people you meet. 

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Ken Wilber

The measure of a man is his unflappability - but this comes not from hardening and defending against painful thoughts, emotions and experiences but by being willing to experience it all.

Hilaire Belloc

Every major question in history is a religious question.

Charters: If only we hadn't missed that train at Budapest.

Caldicott: Well, I don't want to rub it in, but if you hadn't insisted on standing up until they'd finished their national anthem...

Charters: Yes, but you must show respect, Caldicott. If I'd known it was going to last twenty minutes...

Caldicott: It has always been my contention that the Hungarian Rhapsody is not their national anthem. In any case, we were the only ones standing

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To have laughed often and much; won the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; earned the appreciation of honest critics and endured the betrayal of false friends; appreciated beauty; found the best in others; left the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. -

Dostoevsky

Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent, because the European enlightenment is more important than people.

William James

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. 

Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, at the United Nations, 1974

One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.

Julie Burchill’s top five things that make her happy: (1) my marriage, (2) my faith, (3) getting trashed, (4) going on holiday, (5) my friends

Orhan Pamuk

When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year, and which now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble reaching this conclusion: the poor, unemployed and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely.

Soren Kierkegaard

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Richard Halliburton

Youth – nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability —I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the Earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.   

Nadia Comaneci

Do not pray to have an easy life; pray to be a strong person!

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Henry Miller

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. 

W.B. Yeats

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

Rodney Dangerfield

My mother didnt breast feed me. She said she only liked me as a friend.

Alexander Pope

The peoples voice is odd,/It is and it is not the voice of God.

Barry Kolodkin

The most luxurious thing in the world has nothing to do with aristocracy or attractiveness. Its time. Being able to take a nap on a Sunday or having the opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine in a beautiful setting at 16.00 are luxuries well beyond any palace poshness.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there., former US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Marie Louise von Frank

 You have to be lonely so that the unconscious becomes stronger.

There are many people who are not in analysis, but if they are naturally gifted - which I would call if they are honest - they can find these things without analysis.

... the devouring aspect of the unconscious, which suffocates life and prevents the human being from developing. It is the swallowing or the regressive aspect of the unconscious, the looking-backward tendency, which grips when one is overcome by the unconscious.

The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth. ... People living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality.

Jules Romains

Friendship without the everyday becomes an allegory.

Mike Tyson

Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.

Wilhelm 

Love is only a seeking for love in return, Do, ut des (I give, that thou shalt give). If the patient notices that love is not given in return or that it has not reached that degree which he expected, defiance enters in place of the love, which in turn manifests itself as active resistance.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding.

Paul Theroux’s 3 rules of travel: Travel on the ground — avoiding air travel. Travel alone when possible. Keep notes. That’s it.

Mark Steyn

Federally funded cowboy poetry. That phrase has never existed in any language in the entire course of human history. Thats an innovation of our time and the fact that that combination of words can be used with all seriousness by the Senate majority leader of the worlds superpower is an indication of the depths were in. -

R.L. Stevenson

I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Ronnie Smith

Be where you are and look forward. That is where contentment and happiness live.

Martin Israel

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

Where there is an ebullient sense of humour, the holy spirit cannot be far away.

Of one thing I have no doubt: until we can love ourselves there is no possibility of our loving anyone else, even a person as close to us in physical relationship as a parent, spouse or child. Only when we love ourselves with the intensity of charity that will accept all aspects of ourselves as infinitely treasurable, even when they are palpably immature if not frankly perverse, can we be still and flow out in charity to all around us.

If, on the other hand, I acknowledge the darkness that is mine and lift it up to God in prayer, He will, through His healing grace, effect an inner transformation of my psyche, so that I will be driven by love and compassion for others and not by motives of self-improvement. The paradox about self-awareness is that once we have achieved it we should let it go. It is far removed from the self consciousness of the selfish man grasping for material or spiritual gifts to boost the self that he really hates, or that of the neurotic person enslaved by the imagined contempt of others for the self that he despises.

....every relationship is sacred. This applies especially to the most intimate of all relationships, the sexual one. It is a sacrament, and is defiled to the detriment of all participating in it. It is worth remembering that in the properly consummated sexual act, an act in which both parties have lost themselves in love for each other, each experiences a new reality, one that transcends the narrow isolation of personal gratification. Such an experience is the glimpse of mystical union destined for Everyman - by which I mean the person who does not aspire to great spiritual understanding but lives in a useful mundane way - by Gods grace. I believe that this is the primary purpose of sexual union; the other two, growth into a full person and the procreation of the race, are secondary to it. It follows from this that sexual intercourse is a holy action, and should not be contemplated except in a spirit of awe and gratitude. How far man has fallen from this understanding is a measure of his distance from the divine nature implanted in him. I should add at the same time, that those exceptional people called to the state of celibacy in the cause of a greater love for all mankind, may also experience mystical union in their unceasing self-giving to others.

The wise person delays marriage until he has attained sufficient intellectual and emotional balance to judge clearly how he wishes to order his life. The practice of self-control, which is the last fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5.z2), should govern all physical explorations of sex until there is a deep love for the other person.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Skill to do comes of doing.

Paulo Coelho

Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly.

Benjamin Disraeli.

Mr. Kremlin was distinguished for ignorance for he had only one idea and that was wrong.

No man is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

Alfred North Whitehead   

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Silence is the language of God;
It is also the language of the heart.

Yogi Berra

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Nietzsche

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more natural than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tigers claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are.

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Anthony Haden-Guest

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Margaret Thatcher

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Hendrik Ibsen

Live, work, act. Dont sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas.

William James

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. Leonardo da Vinci

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George Bernard Shaw

 Life isnt about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Dr Johnson

When the famous actor David Garrick asked what was the greatest pleasure in life, Johnson answered fucking and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink though all could not fuck

Nietzsche

All philosophy is disguised psychology

Camille Paglia:
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. 

Edward Norman

The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important.

Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith.

Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums.

The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.-John Quincy Adams

Saint Augustine

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand. ~

Lord Salisbury

People are fully alive to the danger of superstition in priests...in course of time they may find out that professors may be just as bad.

‎Evelyn Waugh

I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and therefore it is meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination.

The last Duke of Cambridge

They say I am against reform. I am not against reform. There is a time for everything. And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted.

Epictetus

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

George Orwell

 At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is not done to say it . . . [And] anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, whether in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Cicero

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Aristotle

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

‎Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual. Angela Carter

‎William Trevor

Personally the last person I want to know about is myself.

Its a dry quality that you get with English eccentricity at its best; Irish eccentricity is much more outlandish. Crazier. English eccentricity is something you hardly notice until all of a sudden you realize that youre in the presence of an eccentric mind. Its not like that at all with an Irish eccentric; you know about it all very easily and quickly. English eccentricity has a suburban quality—its like a very neatly trimmed garden in which you suddenly realize that the flower beds arent what they seem to be. Theres a kind of well-turned-out quality about English eccentricity, whereas the Irish equivalent is higgledy-piggledy, and sometimes even noisy. The marvel of the English version is that its almost secretive. Ive never quite believed in the obvious English eccentric, the man who comes into the pub every night and is known to be a dear old eccentric. I always suspect that that is probably self-invention. What I do believe in is the person who scarcely knows hes eccentric at all. Then he says something so extraordinary and you realize he perhaps lives in a world that is untouched by the world you share with him.

I don’t like the Church of England. I feel much more drawn towards Catholicism when I’m in England—not that Id do anything about it. I always feel that Protestantism in England is strangely connected with the military. All the cathedrals here are full of military honors. Its part of an establishment with the armed forces; tombs, rolls of honor, that sort of thing.

Thomas Mann

I’m talking nonsense, I know, but I would rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés.