I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “We yearn for a moments peace and quiet, only to turn on the radio, make a phone call or run an errand as soon as an opportunity for solitude presents itself.”
-- Ronnie Polanezcky - “I have discovered that all human evil comes from this; man's being unable to sit still in a room.”
-- Blaise Pascal - “I used to think it important, when I was younger, to have an opinion on just about every topic. Now I find it easy to say that I don't have an opinion on something and don't need one either, even when the topic elicits active public controversy. It is enough, it might be better even, to simply mull topics through.”
-- Robert Nozick - “I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”
-- E. B. White - “No folly is more costly than that of intolerant idealism.”
-- Winston Churchill - “Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.”
-- Stephen Covey - “No one suspects the days to be gods.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - “Do not hurry. Do not rest.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or a temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than private theatrics from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
-- William James - “First you build your castles in the air, then you build the foundations under them.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness.”
-- Alain de Botton - “We don't need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.”
-- Donald Horban - “Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.”
-- Michael Harrington - “To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly. . .This is my symphony.”
-- William Ellery Channing - “I am more and more inclined to reduce my baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in love with simple things and simple folk- a small house, a hut in the woods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me; impose upon me. They fix the attention on false values, they set up a false standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of character and thought.”
-- John Burroughs - “To secure the greatest amount of pleasure with the least possible outlay should be the aim of all economic effort.”
-- Francois Quesnay - “Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly... The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would be enough to think that we are humans, and death may come this evening.”
-- Marcel Proust - “Only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire, can be beautiful.”
-- Marcel Proust - “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
-- George Orwell - “The gap between what the dissatisfied youth could see in his flat and what Chardin saw in very similiar interiors places the emphasis on a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing... It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient in them.”
-- Alain de Botton - “Qualities like education or an ability to express oneself well did not follow simple paths, and one could not therefore evaluate people on the basic of conspicuous categories.”
-- Alain de Botton - “I believe, contrary to the fashion among our contemporaries, that one can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it.”
-- Marcel Proust - “Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”
-- Marcel Proust - “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
-- Virginia Woolf