T.S. Eliot Quote
Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important
They don’t mean to do harm
But the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.
"Don’t explain. People only hear what they want to hear."
- Paulo Coelho (via dulcetdecember)
(via palequeenliteraryquotes)
"I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party."
- Paul Gilmartin, The Mental Illness Happy Hour (via primaldesire)
(via thebonepalaceballet)
"You never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night (via timedoesnotexisthere)
(via bookoflonging)
"If someone disappoints you over and over, that’s in large part your own fault. Once someone has shown a tendency to be self-centered, you need to recognize that and take care of yourself; people aren’t going to change simply because you want them to."
- Oprah Winfrey (via creatingaquietmind)
(via thesearepeopleyouknow)
"It’s about misunderstandings between people and places. It’s about things being disconnected and looking for moments of connection. There are so many moments in life when people don’t say what they mean, when they are just missing each other, waiting to run into each other in a hallway."
- Sofia Coppola on Lost in Translation (via howtobemorecharming)
(via buynewsoul)
"she wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud, some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people. it was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."
- Carson McCullers (via beryl-azure)
(via word-digest)
"They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demand, “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [The Little Prince] (via foxskin)
(via elixiere)
"I don’t trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It’s a sure sign that they don’t really know anyone."
- Carlos Ruiz Zafon (via showslow)
(via j-adore-tutto)
"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot."
- Mark Twain (via thepaintedbench)
The ‘Busy’ Trap by Tim Kreider (The New York Times)
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “Sobusy.” “Crazybusy”. It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day… I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spent it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Body. Life is too short to be busy.
"Anyhow, he asked himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what’s most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias - constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal."
- Identity, Milan Kundera
"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it."
- George Orwell (via whimsicalele)
(via buynewsoul)
