This week's quotations

Joseph Conrad

We live as we dream...alone

Emile Cioran

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide

to anyone. 

 

Carlos Castaneda

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as either a blessing or a curse.
 
M. Scott Peck


Life is difficult. This is one of the greatest truths because once we truly get it- we transcend it. Once we accept this, then life is no longer difficult. Because once we accept it, the fact that it is difficult no longer matters.


Tony Hawks
Things can be done. The people in life who get them done are the ones who know that, and the ones who don't are the rest.


Malcom Muggeridge


Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message


The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance.”


Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.


I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.


Travel, of course, narrows the mind.


Charles Baudelaire


Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

JD Salinger

All we do our whole, lives long is to go from one pice of holy ground to another.

Scott Fitzgerald

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know that they won’t save us any more than love did.

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God

Thomas Carlyle

The past is attractive because it is drained of fear.

Robin Skynner

An intense preoccupation with politics is usually a means of putting painful personal conflicts outside ourselves, disowning them.

Alexandre Dumas fils

It is only rarely that one can see in a litle boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.

Peter Drucker

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

St Ignatius

A thick and shapeless tree-trunk would never believe that it could become a statue, admired as a miracle of sculpture, and would never submit itself to the chisel of the sculptor, who sees by his genius what he can make of it.

There are very few people who realise what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into his hands and let themselves be formed by his grace.

Eckhart Tolle

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

Christopher Booker

The state of someone who has failed to overcome his fantasy self, and find his central unity, is that of someone who still cannot, at the deepest level of his being, take anything seriously except his own ego.

Aldous Huxley

An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex.

WH Auden

To the man in the street who, I’m sorry to say,

Is a keen observer of life

The word intellectual merely denotes

A man who cheats on his wife.

Voltaire

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Alfred Adler


A clumsy right hand cannot be trained into a skillful right hand by taking thought, by wishing it were less clumsy, or even by avoiding clumsiness. It can become skillful only by exercise in practical achievements, and the incentive to the achievement must be more deeply felt than the discouragement at the hitherto existent clumsiness.

There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.

More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.


Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.



Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.



Behind everyone who behaves as if he were superior to others, we can suspect a feeling of inferiority which calls for very special efforts of concealment. It is as if a man feared that he was too small and walked on his toes to make himself seem taller.



The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

Lawrence Durrell

You have two birth-places you have the place where you were born and then you have a place of predilection when really you wake up to reality....

Before my love has a chance to crystalise, it turns into a deep, a devouring friendship.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

Jonathan Ames


I'm reminded of this line from the movie The Red Shoes: "Life rushes by, time rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on dancing forever." All of that applies to me, except for the red shoes part. Everything seems to be rushing by, and I'm floating above it all, reaching my hand out to life, but not quite grasping it, like waving your hand for a taxi that is clearly occupied.


David Aaronovitch


In his book about British Second World War traitors Sean Murphy, the author, recounts the words of a convicted Waffen SS volunteer, Benson Railton Freeman. Sentenced to ten years’ jail for treachery, Freeman told his lawyer: “This just shows how rotten this democracy is. The Germans would have had the honesty to shoot me.”
I love his disappointment.


Holbrook Jackson

Happiness is a form of courage.  

Eleanor Roosevelt:

If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.

Wilhelm Stekel:

Anxiety is fear of one's self.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.


Picasso

Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life

Nietzsche

All philosophy is disguised psychology

Isaiah Berlin

As you know, I never read a book

Rt. Rev Paul Richardson

We are going to have to invent a new civil religion. Already the process has begun with the observance of Holocaust Day and increasing focus on Human Rights as providing a shared basis for morality. (Daily Telegraph 27 Jun 2009)

Milton Friedman

...the preserves of discrimination in any society are the areas that are most monopolistic in character, whereas discrimination against groups of particular color or religion is least in those areas where there is the greatest freedom of competition.

Ludwig von Mises


If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

Claude Cockburn
Failure, so despicable in others, in oneself the only dignified thing.

(Red?) Indian proverb
Women conquer men by their stillness