Christopher Hamilton > Quotes

“The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer recounts a fable in which he compares human beings to porcupines. On a cold day, the porcupines huddled together for warmth, but, in doing so, hurt each other with their spines. So they moved apart, but in this way became cold again.”
― Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity

“when George Orwell remarked that by forty everyone has the face he deserves, he was making an important observation on middle age; namely, that at forty, or around then – the point is not one that appeals to the literal-minded – one sees in one’s own face what one has to live with, what one has become and what one might hope for in the future.”
― Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

“And it is not possible for us, by our most chimerical wishes, to form the idea of a station or situation altogether desirable.”
― Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity

“There is never time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. (”
― Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

“the only way a marriage can be successful is that the husband is scared shitless of his wife”
― Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity

“loneliness is, I think, characteristic of the experience of mid-life, for that is the time when one is likely to become newly aware of just how hostile the world can be.”
― Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

“All of us are inconsiderate and imprudent, all unreliable, dissatisfied, ambitious … corrupt,’ as the Roman philosopher Seneca reminds us pithily. ‘Therefore, whatever fault he censures in another man, every man will find it residing in his own heart’ (‘On Anger’: 40).”
― Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity

“history is a scene of such relentless suffering inflicted by human beings on themselves and on each other because – or, at any rate, largely because – there have been endless individuals who were sure they knew the truth and sought to get others to agree with them. For those who feel sure they have the answers are usually pretty keen to impose them on others.”
― Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity

“Being an individual is not so much a matter of doing what others have not done or do not do, as it is a matter of doing it in a spirit expressive of your whole being. If you do this, then, as Gould says, you do not beat death; but death cannot beat you.”
― Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity

“Middle age is the time of life in which one sees how important it is to be able to forget a great deal in order to live healthily.”
― Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

“when others in middle age become increasingly aware of their mortality as their body starts to age in a way that cannot be ignored, there is felt the cold presence of death.”
― Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age