Quotes by Journalists - Page 178

Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.
Oliver Burkeman
Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.
Oliver Burkeman
And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.
Oliver Burkeman
And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.
Oliver Burkeman
Twitter is a vessel that we can use to share #positivity to others through our timeline one tweet at a time.
Germany Kent
We have reached the age of denial, we have become happiness seekers, afraid to feel. We are told to think positive, to seek only joy. Stores overflow with books selling you ways to rid yourself of ‘negative’ feelings.
Aysha Taryam
Be positive. Stay happy and don't let the negativity of the world get you down.
Germany Kent
As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.
Barbara Ehrenreich
You have to change your thinking if you desire to have a future different from your present.
Germany Kent
There has never been a more urgent time than now for you to seek to maximize your potential for achieving greater balance in your life.
Germany Kent
By concentrating on what I was grateful for, I was able to stave off despair.
Amanda Lindhout
Viciousness is part of the world we live in, some of us choose to ignore it with the rationalisation of wanting only positivity to flow our way. How selfish we have become! That the pain of others has become a hindrance to the fulfilment of our positive selves.
Aysha Taryam
We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.
Clifford D. Simak
The power of positive thinking will overcome so many things
Malcolm Gladwell
Your thoughts and attitudes today chart your destiny tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty
The key to happiness - or that even more desired thing, calmness - lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. They key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person.
Matt Haig
Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Don’t settle for living mediocre. Focus on all the positive and embrace it. Ignore the negative and be thankful for every single day.
Germany Kent
In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
Barbara Ehrenreich
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.
Alphonse Karr
Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.
Julian Assange
Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality[.]
Rebecca West
You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We've lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. I once more feel a gnawing emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed next to mine.
André Gorz
A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.
Frank Herbert
One in a million cases; such comforting odds, except when you were the one
Gayle Forman
I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech — alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.I believe in the reality of progress.I —But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
H.L. Mencken
While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.
Aleksandar Hemon
I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
George Orwell
In this way Fate outplayed the efforts of mortals-simply to amuse itself, one might think.
Erik Valeur
Like space, the soul is not an expression of eternal constancy but of constant change, and this motion has but one purpose: to continue forward, on the narrow ledge, in the absurd hope that you can escape the Darkness.
Erik Valeur
Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
George Orwell
Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.
Svetlana Alexievich
If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart — reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.
Lev Grossman
That’s the thing with reality, he said, you can’t repeat it to order, you can’t correct it. Perhaps we should read more books.
Peter Stamm
If it’s reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.
Peter Stamm
Reality wasn't as important as people made it out to be; to Jude it was simply the physical state in which he found himself, an environment he had limited control over.
Gemma Malley
If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment
Joe Queenan
Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
My books have very few villains pretending to be righteous, but they are filled with good people who have pretended to be villains so well that they believe it themselves. This is how I like to view reality.
Kenneth Everett
This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
Philip Gourevitch
The triple of Jeremy Brown's imagination, in reality, is a home run.
Michael Lewis
I clap so that I can hold on to this feeling. I clap because I know what will happen when I stop. It’s the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie - one that I’ve lost myself to - which is that I’ll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest.
Gayle Forman
We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not.
Peter Hitchens
If you’re not carefulyou’ll end up believing this is the world
Antonio Cisneros
You have to show reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.
Jorge Ramos
I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad'Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!
Frank Herbert
As for dying, he didn't believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.
John Connolly
In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.
Chuck Klosterman
We're equal before the law - if we pay the same amount
David Lagercrantz
Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life - the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like.
George Orwell
I clap because I know what will happen when I stop. It's the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie - one that I've lost myself to - which is that I'll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I'll watch a movie all over again just to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn't make any sense.
Gayle Forman
If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.
Italo Calvino
Reality can really tax your imagination.
Brooke Gladstone
Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t.
Lev Grossman
I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.
Rivka Galchen
Reality is always richer, more unpredictable than our deductions
Leonardo Sciascia
The reality waves itself an assertion as the rose its fragrance; it doesn't require verifiability of it. Indeed, the weak and ignorant minds need that.
Ehsan Sehgal
This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.
Mark O'Connell