For he who lives as passion directs will not hear argument that dissuades him, nor understand it if he does; and how can we persuade one in such a state to change his ways?
The hallmark of futile negotiations is that each side regards [an] overarching reality as a problem for the people on the other side of the table, rather than one for everyone at the table.
Grace is my favourite church word. A state of being. Something you can pray for. Something God can grant. Something you can obtain. Perfection is out of reach. But grace -- grace you can reach for.
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
Advice," Doña Vorchenza chuckled. "Advice. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage.
It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no mor...
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons.
I don’t think love is blind, true love is probably the most clear-eyed state of being there is.’ ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe with true love, you see and you love anyway…
Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.
The literature hardly helps. You remember it only when you are well, healthy, and in a positive state of mind. And you tend to blame your circumstances and people around you for the outcome of the follies you commit.
Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?
Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;
The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. Quoted in The...
It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable
Happiness isn't reserved for privileged individuals. It is a state of mind that can neither be bought nor stolen nor traded; it is a liberty available to anyone.
Trust is not a passive state of mind. It is a vigorous act of the soul by which we choose to lay hold on the promises of God and cling to them despite the adversity that at times seeks to overwhelms us.
- 'My lord, if a man cannot express his honestly held views in the Central Criminal Court, perhaps you can advise me where else he is free to state that which he believes to be the truth?
