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"For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
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Personal Development
"William Cowper said that God made the country, and man made the town. If it was the opposite, there would be no country; because town can be created from the country but the country cannot be created from the town!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it's an almost losing battle against it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities."
Author Name
Personal Development
"More than anything else, we need in this society the opportunity for people to tell us what they think without being told that they're either dumb, or stupid, or uninformed."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
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Personal Development
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"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
Society
"That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience."
Life
"It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin."
Life
"The world was a vale of tears-it always had been."
Philosophy
"The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true."
Reflection
"And the memory made her humble, for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful."
Reflection
"Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams-it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain."
Philosophy
"She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered."
Relationship
"Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so."
Literature
"Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks."
Sacrifice
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