Manageable Quotes (page 32)
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Old Marcus still managed to function with disquieting resilience. Some never-atrophying instinct warned hi of danger, of gangings up against him--he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it. Nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.
Emile M. Cioran
[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it....
Tom Wolfe
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Autopsychography. The poet is a man who feigns. And feigns so thoroughly, at last. He manages to feign as pain. The pain he really feels, And those who read what once he wrote. Feel clearly, in the pain they read, Neither of the pains he felt, Only a pain they cannot sense. And thus, around its jolting track. There runs, to keep our reason busy, The circling clockwork train of ours. That men agree to call a heart.
Fernando Pessoa
