Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.
In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.
When you are not treated seriously, you develop comically. Its sense of oneself is so fractured and fragile that it's like the picked-on kid who has to become funny.
To sustain oneself, one should learn to not take success or failure too seriously. You just need the confidence to stand there and say 'Even if I fall, I can get up.'
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
The danger of a rock band is repeating oneself. It's our greatest fear - that it evolves into the myopia of a semi-successful band that's in love with its own shadow.
I really like to try my hand at everything, and I think it's probably dangerous to let oneself be pigeon-holed, not necessarily by other people, but in one's own mind.
Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.
What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.
In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself. It's a never ending study, once we have learned to love, we will learn to live. Love creates an 'us' without destroying a 'me!'
Cricketers and Bollywood stars are attracted to each other because they are both well-known in their fields, and the constant pressure of proving oneself doesn't exist.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Everyone who means well gives advice based on his or her perception. I have realized that while it's important to hear the suggestions, one should only listen to oneself.
I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.
Grooming oneself with all the crazed compulsion of an under-exercised lab rat in order to hook a rich man and obtain a lush lifestyle makes a certain (albeit seedy) sense.
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. I will not try it. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.
To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.
Offspring, the due performance on religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depend on one's wife alone.
It's important to have an examined life - but it's a fine line between having an examined life and being hypercritical of oneself. There has to be balance in there somewhere.
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
I think one should take criticism in one's stride and prove oneself. In fact, I would like to thank my critics as their criticism gave me the fire and passion to prove myself.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.
There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.
Nowadays excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.
I can only say that one's individual situation is more real and important to oneself than the devastations of fates and empires especially when they do not vitally affect oneself.
Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.
To speak of oneself means to lay bare one's own soul, expose it like a body to the sun. To lay bare one's own soul is not at all like taking off one's brassiere on a crowded beach!
One of the beautiful things about Tyler Durden in 'Fight Club' is that he seems to understand the implicit vanity and self-absorption that comes with the desire to improve oneself.
In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing.
Cohabitation seems a greater leap in cities because it's all the harder to extract oneself if things turn sour. It's what keeps otherwise functional adults living with their mothers.
I find putting oneself out there difficult. I think writing and sharing writing require different skill sets. I want to be read, but it takes courage to ask someone to read your work.
In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.
I've hung on for a long time in this business and had some success, and I think it's keeping an open mind and being curious and having a sense of humor about oneself that's important.
Carrying out the thing, getting it to the point when one might say: There, now it is good - that point is hard to reach. Often, one sets very high goals for oneself. Perhaps too high.
I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
The feeling of having no choice or no say is a fear of mine, partly because the idea of loosening oneself from the burden and responsibility of choice and consequence is so intoxicating.
To busy oneself with what is futile when one can do something useful, to attend to what is simple when one has the mettle to attempt what is difficult, is to strip talent of its dignity.
In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.