Understanding Yourself Quotes (page 3)
You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.
John Waters
1) Never trust a cop in a raincoat.2) Beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway.3) If asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again.4) Never give your real name.5) If ever asked to look at yourself, don't look.6) Never do anything the person standing in front of you can't understand.7) Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.
Hunter S. Thompson
Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I pray that you will understand the words of Jesus, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Ask yourself “How has he loved me? Do I really love others in the same way?” Unless this love is among us, we can kill ourselves with work and it will only be work, not love. Work without love is slavery.
Mother Teresa
Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun."
"I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?).
I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which...
Joanna Russ
Have you ever been turned down by a girl who afterwards married and then been introduced to her husband? If so you'll understand how I felt when Clarence burst on me. You know the feeling. First of all, when you hear about the marriage, you say to yourself, "I wonder what he's like." Then you meet him, and think, "There must be some mistake. She can't have preferred this to me!
P. G. Wodehouse
This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".
John Steinbeck
You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred? Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't your head it all your life? I want to be happy people say. Well aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation ? And you must admit that our culture provides plenty of these.
Ray Bradbury
It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that? bring them up? and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself? finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.
Erik Erikson