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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bec31d2 | Sledovani televize je pasivni. Neni to dovednost. Kdyz budete casteji sledovat televizi, nezlepsite se v tom. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 3e626d7 | Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in "An Apology for Idlers" (1885): "Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogm.. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| f532c13 | It seems no body's business to try to better things | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 2adb566 | It's easier to robe the poor. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 66b321f | Thus it is that the Internet, once heralded as an exciting new medium of communication, is now little more than a vast mail-order catalogue. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 0e80385 | Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides ... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an .. | David Mitchell | ||
| 384923e | Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish yo.. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 8a1dd62 | Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale. | boredom truth | Tom Hodgkinson | |
| 1c1b38d | Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| baa4baf | Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need. | insurance-policy | Tom Hodgkinson | |
| c27e314 | If you want health, wealth and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks! | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 2c66806 | the terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 7bfc130 | Are you okay being alone? Are you strong enough to go a few more rounds if it comes to that? Are you comfortable with challenges? Does uncertainty bother you? How does pressure feel? Because these things will happen to you. No one knows when or how, but their appearance is certain. And life will demand an answer. You chose this for yourself, a life of doing things. Now you better be prepared for what it entails. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| bc3690a | Winston Churchill, who abhorred laziness in other people, himself took a nap every afternoon. He defended his afternoon doze in practical terms as an absolute necessity: You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginati.. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 812628a | We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives! | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 5ba5ad3 | there is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 927c4d8 | The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment." | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 84f1558 | One of the symptoms of the approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important & that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. Bertrand Russell | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 9f9f51d | Don't bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 5ee7d9f | Behaving as if you are better than others shows a lack of regard for other people. | Tom Hodgkinson | ||
| 518b90c | No matter what you've done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you're not still learning, you're already dying. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| ebe40f3 | Remember: even what we get for free has a cost, if only in what we pay to store it--in our garages and in our minds. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| c0cd186 | You pay your money and you takes your choice. | Herbert Asbury | ||
| ab4559b | Philadelphia was a cosmopolitan city, praised by a highborn British visitor as "one of the wonders of the world," "the first town in America," and one that "bids fair to rival almost any in Europe." 27 Larger than either New York or Boston, it supported ten newspapers and thirty bookshops. Largely through the civic imagination of Benjamin Franklin, it boasted an astounding panoply of cultural and civic institutions, including two theaters, .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 6c5ef59 | Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth." --MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 4.48.2" | Ryan Holiday | ||
| ca65be0 | Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wide-worlders in transit, all those misplaced, thrown-away people who know as little as they care about their roots--how do they do it? How do they know who they are? | David Mitchell | ||
| c3ebdb9 | I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and | David Mitchell | ||
| 773ec77 | lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the on.. | David Mitchell | ||
| e08346f | the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; | David Mitchell | ||
| eea27db | Holly Sykes," says Publicity Girl, falling down the sar-chasm." | David Mitchell | ||
| 0cf2bd4 | On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket - and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines, saudade, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Adana, he sees a woman, her fingers toying with.. | David Mitchell | ||
| bebd902 | I play chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn't a mind of digital code but Dad: It's Dad's attacks I repel; Dad's defenses I dismantle; Dad's king scurrying around the board to prolong the inevitable. | David Mitchell | ||
| b41b59d | We're sliding into a society where the first thing you need to do to demonstrate that you're any good at something is to say that you are. Under the old rules, boasts were assumed empty until proved otherwise. You had to impress with your actions, draw attention to yourself subtly without being seen to do so. It's a hell of a lot more fun than the pantomime of self-belief we see on reality TV today. A society where you're not allowed to blo.. | David Mitchell | ||
| eb55a46 | Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me. | David Mitchell | ||
| 43cbe18 | The days when I had that kind of spondulics at my beck and call are gone, gone, gone! Our house is mortgaged, twice over! | David Mitchell | ||
| 01f4828 | It is a cycle as old as tribalism. In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the only law is whatever is willed by the most powerful. | David Mitchell | ||
| bbe4ce2 | What's the book like?" "Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!" -- | piffle twaddle | David Mitchell | |
| 7ce23cb | Then the true true is diff'rent to the seemin' true? said I. Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds. | David Mitchell | ||
| a196ccb | Because the script was written referring not to Iraq as it was, but to a fantasy Iraq as Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush et al. wanted it to be, or dreamt it to be, or were promised by their pet Iraqis-in-exile it would be. They expected to find a unified state like Japan in 1945. Instead, they found a perpetual civil war among majority Shi'a Arabs, minority Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. Saddam Hussein--a Sunni--had imposed a brutal peace on the country.. | David Mitchell | ||
| fdb36e4 | Forty minutes, times sixty seconds, that's twenty-four thousand seconds to go. | David Mitchell | ||
| 73e1ac2 | Soviet imperialism's as bad as American capitalism. | David Mitchell | ||
| 1e3efd6 | This is peace, if you think about it--machine-gun nests being used as picnic tables. | David Mitchell | ||
| a4bb8b5 | Brainchild" is an odd word. You hear it a lot in explanatory voiceovers and I suppose I was trying to join in, but I don't really like it. I'm not keen on the idea that my brain could have a child. Would it be made of brain - a child, made of grey brain, like a squelchy zombie? As metaphors for inspiration go, I prefer the lightbulb." | David Mitchell | ||
| a3fd80e | Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. | David Mitchell |