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"Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them."
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"It takes all sorts of people to make a world, as I've often heard, but I think there are some who could be spared,' Anne told her reflection in the east gable mirror that night."
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Personal Development
"Most peoples are prisoners of other people's thoughts."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Your water is in the bottles, and my water is in the bucket, but we are brothers? I am collecting garbage, and you are in the bed, but we are sisters? My fingers are broken, and your hands are so soft, but we are family? Your God is like an angel, and my God is like an evil, but we are equal? My stomach is empty, and your stomach is so big, but we are humans?"
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Personal Development
"PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary."
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Personal Development
"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
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Personal Development
"Women who don't like the rules change the rules."
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Personal Development
"Large families are communities unto their own."
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Personal Development
"People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice!"
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Personal Development
"Probably the people on the street know better than the people at home."
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Personal Development
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"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
Life
"The land of embarrassment and breakfast."
Society
"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
Literature
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
Memory
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
Life
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
Philosophy
"Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure."
Relationship
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
Observation
"Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death."
Philosophy
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
Philosophy
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