top of page
.png){kind=small}
"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."
Standard
Customized
More
"I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You're too old for fairy tales, Baasen said."
Author Name
Personal Development
"By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The real world is oftentimes different from what you expect it to be, what you think it to be, and what people might say it to be."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen."
Author Name
Personal Development
"But, Henry, this is wicked!' But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. 'The weak are meat, the strong do eat."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don't. When you're up here, you realize how distant they really are-how impossible to reach."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."
Travel
"If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us."
Psychology
"Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it."
Curiosity
"A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily."
Art
"It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships."
Ambition
"In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well."
Work
"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."
Commitment
"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."
Life
"In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion."
Art
"Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election, to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers."
Politics
bottom of page