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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cced74a | Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves. | Glen Cook | ||
| f55b274 | She is the darkness. | Glen Cook | ||
| 8f3d170 | No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our only mourners. It is the Company against the world. Thus it has been and ever will be. | Glen Cook | ||
| aa556c7 | The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found th.. | perspective timelessness | Alister E. McGrath | |
| 4739e7b | Literature offers us a different way of seeing things. The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.[94] | Alister E. McGrath | ||
| 12508d6 | Protestantism developed its sense of identity primarily in response to external threats and criticisms rather than as a result of shared beliefs. In one sense, the idea of "Protestantism" can be seen as the creation of its opponents rather than of its supporters." | protestantism religion | Alister E. McGrath | |
| d648b67 | Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 3d86034 | Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn't give. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 679ee02 | The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out. | city london potential | Hanif Kureishi | |
| 34cf457 | As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 390bf92 | You know, when you end a relationship and say you fell out of love, you actually mean you were never really in love. The past is a river, not a statue. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 5727e04 | Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They'll sit on anyone's knee. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 2e6a9b4 | You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world. | initiative perseverance society | Hanif Kureishi | |
| 028c8bf | The truth is a tattoo on your forehead. You can't see it yourself. I am your mirror. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| f49f23d | I am dust and my story ends here. | ends story | Hanif Kureishi | |
| 6a985aa | It is not easy to hurl snowballs while holding on to a plastic bag of groceries, so my first few efforts were subpar, missing their mark. The nine maybe ten nine-maybe-ten-year-olds ridiculed me - if I turned to aim at one, four others outflanked me and shot from the sides and the back. I was, in the parlance of an ancient day, cruising for a bruising, and while a more disdainful teenager would have walked away, and a more aggressive teenag.. | Rachel Cohn & David Levithan | ||
| 4d6658c | We're not people," he said. "We're the stories that people tell each other about us." -- | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5bb077b | A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 102bbb4 | Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability. | status values | Alain de Botton | |
| b0686b8 | Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall. | Alain de Botton | ||
| f4560e3 | The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a deeper, often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation. We don't only want to things; we want to be through our ownership of them. Once we examine consumer behaviour with sufficient attention and generosity, it be.. | change desires life material-goods materialism necessity psychology purchases | Alain de Botton | |
| ad11cda | The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1fc54e6 | For all the talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated. Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens. Cocooned in classrooms for only our first eighteen years or so, we effectively spend the rest of our lives under the tutelage of news entities which wield infinitely greate.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7632518 | But the answer isn't just to intimidate people into consuming more 'serious' news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is too easy to claim that serious things must be, and can almost afford to be, a bit boring. The challenge is to transcend the current dichotomy between those outlets that offer thoughtful but impotent instruction on the one ha.. | engagement interest news presentation responsibility sensationalism seriousness thoughtfulness | Alain de Botton | |
| ebce50c | The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than a cliche life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their parents, and that there are persuasive reasons for calling a loved one Plouplou, Missou, or poor little wolf. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 60b8e89 | A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1be2ddd | Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away, but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life. Our | Alain de Botton | ||
| 3677ef5 | We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once, at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn't possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few children, and naming each other in their wills. Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren't exercise.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7f9fb9f | We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day. | melodrama relationships self significance sorrows | Alain de Botton | |
| 9ad3a04 | The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves. | materialism priorities self-knowledge status | Alain de Botton | |
| ad5dada | A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 4cea4ef | Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, who I had not known existed a few hours ago, had already acquired the status of a craving. I felt I would die if I missed her outside - die for the sake of someone who had only entered my life at eleven thirty that morning. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a5656e2 | It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 04df8b1 | A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten | Alain de Botton | ||
| 42fadde | Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche's useful phrase, 'the bad odours of religion'. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don'.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 6bdecaf | The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. It's often imagined that it'll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hint that the other strikes us as exceptionally attractive or accomplished. But surprisingly, it is deeply worrying to be obviously adored, because everyone, from the inside, knows very well that they don't deserve intense acclaim, are often disapp.. | admiration intimacy seduction | Alain de Botton | |
| 9851c63 | With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. | Alain de Botton | ||
| d1d787e | Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be inseparable. The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them. It proposes that it can be entirely natural and even healthy for partners in a couple occasionally to have sex with strangers for whom they .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 190f752 | In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the alter, a couple would speak thus: "We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species." After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| c20e445 | Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply - at long last - a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 651dd23 | Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or re.. | travel | Alain de Botton | |
| f5cefa9 | We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 06df67b | What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other ... you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief ... or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to dimini.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 55064f4 | It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. | Alain de Botton |