Personalization Quotes (page 253)
The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn't to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her...
Truman Capote
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.
Stephen King
Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil? a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons? never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error? Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of...
Fulton J. Sheen
The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally found person to rediscover it, until some of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
John Stuart Mill
Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual? how can I guess why Ai must not weep?
Ursula K. Le Guin
You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.
Carl Rogers
I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.
Cheryl Strayed
To Epictetus, all external events are determined by fate, and are thus beyond our control, but we can accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. Individuals, however, are responsible for their own actions which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline. Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power. As part of the universal city that is the universe, human beings have a duty of care to all fellow...
Epictetus