miscellaneous24 quotes

“On the steps of the Forum at Timgad, one board sums it all up with ‘Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that’s living.’ (VENARI LAVARE LUDERE RIDERE OCCEST VIVERE).”

“No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved. All the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”

“Any bird or creature may be hunted down, any nest discovered, if you lay siege to it; but to find what you are not looking for, to catch the shy winks and gestures on every side, to see all the byplay going on around you, missing no significant note or movement, penetrating every screen with your eye-beams—that is to be an observer, that is to have “an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch,”—a touch that can distinguish a white horse from a black—a detective eye that reads the faintest signs.”

“You see the darkest sides of human nature when you’ve got either zero or a million bucks. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.”

“Much right-wing internet discourse boils down to a complaint that society won’t let men be men. These dissidents tend to project a fantasy image of the masculine man as an independent figure, bold, risk-taking, creative and authoritative. But if masculinity is predicated on independence and strength, how can it be stifled by women and effeminate men? Pretend patriarchs are more comfortable in their subordinate roles than they’d like to think.”

“No animals harmed in the making of our products except for the animals who eat them.”

“No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.”

“Never go with a hippie to a second location.”

“Roi ne suis, ne prince ne duc ne comte aussi; Je suis le sire de Coucy.”

“When my boots hit the boards, I’m a brand new man/

With my back to the horizon I’ll make my stand.”

“I think our memories are benevolent with respect to other people’s failures because they just aren’t very emotionally salient for us. Perhaps we feel compassionate, or we might feel judgmental. More often, we just don’t think of them. In any event, failure is not as significant from the outside. To the outside eye, the course of a life consists of the bright peaks achieved, with the long gray plateau of ordinary days edited away.”

“It’s important to realize that you are allowed to have some shortcomings that you don’t address. In fact, I think accomplishing anything of real value in life requires accepting the finitude of time and the practicality of being mediocre in areas you don’t care about.”

“...the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.”

“The exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re actually trying.”

“When you’re strong in a particular way, it’s easy to settle into achieving adequate results by being narrowly exceptional and broadly mediocre.”

“If there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what will be orthodox, in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith in it.”

“Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation.”

“What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”

“I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in. These things I still have, I remind myself—and shall have until I leave them.”

“It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.”

“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save —the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

“In the absence of strong convictions about what you want from life, you will always default to wanting more money.”

“When you get to where you’re going, is it too late to know you’re wrong?”

“His life was a pool not so easy to fish in.”