Better Life Quotes (page 17)
-
-
-
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man? and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages? it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him...
Albert Camus
Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.
Philip Pullman
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with...
Germaine Greer
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is...
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
What it boiled down to is the strength to be able to say, 'I don't want to think about it.' Thinking negatively is the result of guilt and insecurity... You are the person who makes yourself happy. You're the person who makes yourself sad. It's much easier to feel better when you keep remembering that." [-p.481, "Caesar's Hours, My Life in Comedy with Love and Laughter", by Sid Caesar with Eddy Friedfeld, 2003]
Sid Caesar