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"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 recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be."
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"Sweet pea, you are my favorite hello and my hardest goodbye, and I don't want to go a day without you. Consider that your official invitation."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Funny thing about the monster. The worse he treats you, the more you love him."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Attachment-abhorrence is the foundation for the worldly life and the foundation for 'Knowledge' is a state free of all attachments (vitragta)."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When attachment increases too much, dislike will arise."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Keep on doing whatever it is that you have been doing; but, do no attachment-abhorrence. If 'You' stay in 'Your [Pure Soul] state'; attachment-abhorrence will not occur."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Wherever there is ownership, there is upadhi (externally induced problems)."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Once an opinion is formed, there will be attachment-abhorrence. A person without opinion is also without attachment-abhorrence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And I have to say, books haven't helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there's always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is, Well, it's just you. And when you go, it's gone. Nothing abstract about it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Without attachment, a naked body is merely a lifeless sex-toy."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment."
Satire
"There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise."
Awareness
"The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among."
Identity
"The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil."
War
"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."
Responsibility
"Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see."
Legacy
"A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation."
Society
"Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul. And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness."
Awe
"The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality."
Emotion
"What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it."
Art
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