Tuesday 8 October 2013

'That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time'

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John Stuart Mill

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.

Ronald Firbank 


`O, help me heaven,' she prayed,`to be decorative and to do right.'


Dame Muriel Spark

The experience of evil can induce conversion as much as the experience of good.

Dorothea Brandt


The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world.

Sybille Bedford

If I knew myself better I wouldn't have to write books.

Nelson Mandela, quoting Marianne Williamson in his inaugural speech 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?


Nicolas Sarkozy

I’m a stranger to the past. The only thing that interests me is this afternoon, tomorrow.

Leo Babauta

I’ve written the book on ending procrastination, but I’ve since come up with a very simple technique for beating everyone’s favourite nemesis. It is incredibly easy, but as with anything, it takes a little practice.
Try it now:
Identify the most important thing you have to do today.
Decide to do just the first little part of it — just the first minute, or even 30 seconds of it. Getting started is the only thing in the world that matters.


Charles Moore

House prices, pensions, soft furnishings, designer labels, restaurant reviews, school exams, diets, where to go on holiday, gyms, "spirituality" (as opposed to religion), organic vegetables, work/life balance, electrical and computer equipment, careers, satnav, health, drugs, rock music, personal fulfilment, skiing. These are the sort of things that the modern middle-class, middle-aged talk about. All perfectly reasonable topics, but I do rather long to change the subject.


Terry Eagleton

The good man or woman is one who excels at the precarious business of being human. Those who become really brilliant at being human – the saints – are the virtuosi of life, the Pavarottis and Wayne Rooneys of virtue. Goodness is a kind of joie de vivre, a source of energy and high spirits. As for the New Testament, it is about enjoying an abundance of life, not about paying your taxes and rolling in for work on time.

Charles Lamb 


I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his.

Beatrice Webb, 1884 

Social questions are the vital questions of the day. They take the place of religion.


Carl Jung, 1938

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

1 comment:

  1. excellent ones , my favorite list on quotes ever. except for sarkozy.. he looks greedy. laur

    ReplyDelete