Quotes by Journalists - Page 140

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
Frank Herbert
Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.
John Connolly
Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.
José Saramago
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
Albert Camus
the struggle is not with others, but within us, to do what we are called to do
John Geddes
...you don't need a calling to minister love...
John Geddes
The rhythms of the game complemented the lifestyle he preferred.
Nicholas Dawidoff
All professions have some element of theater to them.
David Halberstam
Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.
David Halberstam
He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.
David Halberstam
When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.
David Halberstam
He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.
George F. Will
Robert Kennedy was inspired to take on organized crime by watching the landmark movie On the Waterfront.
David Talbot
Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.
Richard Brookhiser
Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they'll be fired.
Ron Suskind
When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville
George F. Will
You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.
David Hewson
The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers. Teaching is a calling, too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy--angles leading their flocks out of the darkness.
Jeannette Walls
As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive.
Jack London
the abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart...
John Geddes
...to know an other's interior life you are his confessor or a writer - the one is admitted freely, the other intrudes by discerning of spirits
John Geddes
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…
Joan Didion
There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can.
Hunter S. Thompson
...we fear monsters because we fear the dark parts of ourselves...
John Geddes
...we each harbor a shadow self with shadowy motives and murky desires...
John Geddes
...people demonize certain types of crime - it's a way of distancing ourselves from the monsters...
John Geddes
...ambition or contentment? This simple question led me back to a more balanced view of life and put me in touch with the Me I used to know...
John Geddes
Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves,As souls only understand souls.
Walt Whitman
Nature has gone to great lengths to hide our subconscious from ourselves. Why?
Robert Wright
Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.
Frank Herbert
The act of underlining always contains an element of self-recognition.
Eric Weiner
old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him -- or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.
José Saramago
The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides.
Gayle Forman
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
If inanimate objects are left to stand in their world, and are not invited out to mingle with our sense of self, they will quietly console and delight us. But to bind possessions up closely with the mind is less than fair to both.
Kennedy Fraser
Your self…is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.
Tom Wolfe
When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.
Clarice Lispector
Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.
Meghan Daum
My anger feels hot and bilious but I keep it bottled until it doubles back and I'm mad at myself.
Gayle Forman
As psychologist Bruce Hood writes in his book The Self Illusion, you have an origin story and a sense that you’ve traveled from youth to now along a linear path, with ups and downs that ultimately made you who you are today. Babies don’t have that. That sense is built around events that you can recall and place in time. Babies and small children have what Hood calls “unconscious knowledge,” which is to say they simply recognize patterns and make associations with stimuli. Without episodic memories, there is no narrative; and without any narrative, there is no self. Somewhere between ages two and three, according to Hood, that sense of self begins to come online, and that awakening corresponds with the ability to tell a story about yourself based on memories. He points to a study by Alison Gopnik and Janet Astington in 1988 in which researchers presented to three-year-olds a box of candy, but the children were then surprised to find pencils inside instead of sweets. When they asked each child what the next kid would think was in the box when he or she went through the same experiment, the answer was usually pencils. The children didn’t yet know that other people have minds, so they assumed everyone knew what they knew. Once you gain the ability to assume others have their own thoughts, the concept of other minds is so powerful that you project it into everything: plants, glitchy computers, boats with names, anything that makes more sense to you when you can assume, even jokingly, it has a sort of self. That sense of agency is so powerful that people throughout time have assumed a consciousness at the helm of the sun, the moon, the winds, and the seas. Out of that sense of self and other selves come the narratives that have kept whole societies together. The great mythologies of the ancients and moderns are stories made up to make sense of things on a grand scale. So strong is the narrative bias that people live and die for such stories and devote whole lives to them (as well as take lives for them).
David McRaney
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runway sun, I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again look for me under your boot soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you
Walt Whitman
I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew.
Molly Moore
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.
George Orwell
There's more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You'd think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we're going to join.
Meghan Daum
I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.
Philip Hoare
Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
Michael Finkel
I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.
Lev Grossman
I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.
George Orwell
Most of the tools from medieval times were extensions of the physical self. Tools are now extensions of the mental self.
Lotoya Peterson
I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.
Albert Camus
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, / And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten / million years, / I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
Walt Whitman
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
Joan Didion
When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love.
Mitch Albom
You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Do not postpone what's important to you simply because others don't share your priorities
Hemal Jhaveri
Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal.
Sándor Márai
Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have.
Ken Ilgunas
If you are setting a goal without understanding the reason for it, then maybe you should reevaluate the goal in general.
Tina Brown