Fortunate Quotes (page 13)
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Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.
Thomas Merton
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide
Alan Watts
From jygging vaines of riming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keepes in pay, Weele leade you to the stately tent of War: Where you shall heare the Scythian Tamburlaine, Threatning the world with high astounding tearms. And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. View but his picture in this tragicke glasse, And then applaud his fortunes if you please.
Christopher Marlowe
the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities … His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever ... the...
Joseph Conrad
When remedies are past, the griefs are ended. By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. To mourn a mischief that is past and gone. Is the next way to draw new mischief on. What cannot be preserved when fortune takes, Patience her injury a mockery makes. The robb'd that smiles steals something for the thief; He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.
William Shakespeare
How fortunate that it was an 'unconventional' party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, but Mrs Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety.
E. M. Forster
There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people. Those were not his dumplings.
Cory Doctorow
Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough tomake them understood. It too often happens in some conversations, as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have. Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those thatare full of precious Drugs. They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level. Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the. Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings haveneed of a...
William Penn
