Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance? People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.
If intentions equaled actions, we’d be having pie-in-the-sky for dessert tonight.
We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”. People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.
Properly defined, rest is an activity.
It’s not how a Southerner speaks that distinguishes him, it’s what he says. A few years back I stood at an intersection in Atlanta’s legal and financial district. Beside me stood a trim erect gentleman with feather-cut silver hair wearing, I estimated, a $1200 blazer, a pair of $400 slacks, and $300 loafers. I might just as well have been in Wall Street. Before the light changed, the elegant gentleman turned to the man on the other side of him and said, “Bubba’s comin’ to Mama’s house Sunday.”
When a politician opens his mouth, it’s not a coin I want to shove into the slot.
We’ve only got a little over 900,000 years to get it right. The anthropologists say a dominant species of mammal endures for a million years. Our prognosis is not very bright for dying with our integrity intact.
The hawk has not a sharper eye than a father looking for evidence of his own character in his adult children.
Don’t altogether ignore people who can’t speak coherently or to the point, because they may have authentic insights but not be able to formulate them constructively. Be wise rather than just intelligent, and appreciate every notion deriving genuinely from experience.
The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.
I don’t like looking overlong at an acquaintance when he’s not aware I’m watching. I start imagining outlandish things about him. I think this is because he’s affectless at such times, so my sensibility isn’t influenced by the familiar prods and kneading we carry on with when we deliberately interact.
Two people are talking about wine, jazz. Postmodernism and cinema with striking knowledgeability. One is actually sophisticated and the other is a phony. How do we tell which is which? The phony regards his lore as a possession and is always compelled to uphold and defend its validity. The true sophisticate thinks of learning as discovery; he often changes his opinion and is absolutely the antithesis of egocentric.
When you’re done with all the busywork, you won’t feel less alone.
Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it? Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off. I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.
People who lack intelligence but consider themselves to be “players” self-identify by flagrantly accentuating their sexual characteristics, as though a fabulous distinction accrued to them by virtue of possessing the primary appendages of the species.
Wreck children at your peril. The acuteness of their pain inspires an unappeasable hunger for payback.
Pleasure is a sensation, happiness an emotion, satisfaction a mood, and contentment a dreaming rumination.
A fair-sized industry has arisen to pay tribute justly to the generation of World War II. But the heroics of that generation did not emerge from a vacuum. They were gestated in the soul-scalding forge of the Great Depression. America’s not ready to listen to that story yet.
Perhaps the multiculturalists have a point. What entitles us to the arrogant belief that Western Civilization is the way to go? We ought always to seek to better our condition by learning how other cultures do things. Let’s adopt the educational standards of the Ivory Coast, the culinary hygiene of New Guinea, the judicial-system fairness of Saudi Arabia, the religious tolerance of Sri Lanka, the imaginative television programming of Mongolia, the political liberties of Myanmar, the urban sciences of India, the high-tech infrastructure of Tajikistan, the after-school programs in Brazil, the foreign affairs genius of North Korea, the child-labor policies of Bangladesh, the social justice of Zimbabwe, the common-ground ethnic togetherness of Cyprus, the engineering ingenuity of Samoa, the freedom of dissent of Iran, the sell-your-daughter-into-prostitution ethos of Thailand, the marital relations of Pakistan, the pollution-control zeal of Mexico, the table manners of Micronesia, the philosophy of the Eskimos, the University-studies rationale of Azerbaijan, the cinema of Malaysia, the musical sophistication of Easter Island, the anti-corruption policies of the Philippines, the comedy sketches of Somalia, the legislative shrewdness of Rarotonga, the contemplative politics of South Korea and Taiwan, the relaxed code of leisure of Japan, the public defecation facilities of China, the rationalized traffic control of Ecuador, the fine art of Borneo, the literary distinctions of Tierra del Fuego, the prisoner-rehabilitation policies of Turkey, the pluralistic harmony of Rwanda, plus clitorectomy, and we’ll see how it goes.
The artist and the intellectual ought to fear decadence more than ignorance. Ignorance is a quality that enlightenment may ameliorate, whereas decadence is a condition curable only by despair following a catastrophe.