Tag: Quote

Kindness, Worth it – George Saunders Quote

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

George Saunders. Advice to Graduates via NYTIMES

Formalist at the Pulpit – Emerson Quote

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Divinity School Address
Amazon

An addict is an egomaniac with low self-esteem

“Of course, I wasn’t seeing it so clearly then, I was so fucked up on alcohol and heroin. You know that saying, Zesty, that at the core, the best definition of an addict is an egomaniac with low self-esteem?”
I nod, smoke.
“Well, then, you have a good picture of what I was.”

Abramowitz, Adam. A Town Called Malice
A bike messenger navigates Boston’s gritty underworld of gangsters and blood money in this novel with more twists and turns than Boston’s streets, in Adam Abramowitz’s A Town Called Malice.

If one can’t become a nomad physically, one should at least become one mentally – Joseph Brodsky

The best reason for being a nomad is not the fresh air but the escape from the rationalist theory of society based on the rationalist interpretation of history, since the rationalist approach to either is a blithely idealistic flight from human intuition. A nineteenth-century philosopher could afford it. You can’t. If one can’t become a nomad physically, one should at least become one mentally. You can’t save your skin, but you can try for your mind.

Profile of Clio, Joseph Brodsky
On Grief and Reason: Essays
Amazon

We Live in Rebel Occupied Territory – C.S. Lewis Quote

“But I freely admit that real Christianity (as distinct from Christianity-and-water) goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity

Aes Triplex, Robert Louis Stevenson

As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcass, has most time to consider others.

Aes Triplex, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Check out the whole thing at Project Gutenberg

Meditation – Julian of Norwich

Meditation
Prayer unites the soul to God. For though the soul be ever like to God in nature and substance, restored by grace, it is often unlike in condition by sin on man’s part. Then is prayer a witness that the soul wills as God wills, and it comforts the conscience and enables man to grace. And He teaches us to pray and mightily trust that we shall have it. For He beholdeth us in love and would make us partners of His good deed. And therefore He moves us to pray for that which it pleases Him to do.

Prayers (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

Julian of Norwich (c. 8 November 1342 – c. 1416) was an English Christian mystic and theologian. Little is known of her life. Even her name is uncertain, the name “Julian” probably originated from the Church of St. Julian, Norwich, where she was an anchoress.

Wikiquote

“A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.” – Robert Warshow

Within a day after Zonka gave me the job, I read The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow. He wrote, “A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.” By this he meant that the critic has to set aside theory and ideology, theology and politics, and open himself to—well, the immediate experience. More than once in my early years his words allowed me to find an approach to writing about movies I didn’t understand, like Bergman’s Persona the first time I saw it. I wrote about what happened to me.

Ebert, Roger. Life Itself
Amazon

Bruce Lee on Self Acceptance

This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.

Be Like Water: The Philosophy and Origin of Bruce Lee’s Famous Metaphor for Resilience, Maria Popova
Brain Pickings

“a thing will not really live unless it first dies” – C.S. Lewis quote

“This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity