Assuming Quotes (page 14)
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THE OWLSby: Charles Baudelaire. UNDER the overhanging yews, The dark owls sit in solemn state, Like stranger gods; by twos and twos. Their red eyes gleam. They meditate. Motionless thus they sit and dream. Until that melancholy hour. When, with the sun's last fading gleam, The nightly shades assume their power. From their still attitude the wise. Will learn with terror to despise. All tumult, movement, and unrest; For he who follows every shade, Carries the memory in his breast, Of each...
Charles Baudelaire
Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.
Barry Lopez
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Margaret Atwood
One of the biggest - and I would guess most common - mistakes parents make is to transfer their own childhood shit onto their kids. Whatever their joys and agonies were growing up, they assume will be exactly the same for their children, and they let it guide their parenting. I can see the same dumb instincts in myself. When I first started hanging out with my old boyfriend's kids, I found it depressing because I would just look at them and think of how miserable they must be, and how totally...
Sarah Silverman
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.
Tom Robbins
Good government should maintain the balance where every individual may have a place if he will take it, where every individual may find safety if he wishes it, where every individual may attain such power as his ability permits, consistent with his assuming the accompanying responsibility.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
In psychoanalytical theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood... it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love. I'm just in transference.
Jodi Picoult
What is certain is that the world has got beyond the stage at which one may affect modesty and maidenly shame, and I think that the world is too old a duffer to assume to be childish and maidenly without becoming ridiculous. Since its marriage to civilization society has forfeited its right to be ingenuous and prudish. There is a blush which beseems the bride as she is being bedded, which would be out of place on the morrow; for the young wife mayhap remembers no more what it is to be a girl,...
Theophile Gautier
A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton