Matthew Osborn > Matthew's Quotes

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
― Spinoza

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“Do you believe,' said Candide, 'that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?'
Do you believe,' said Martin, 'that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
― Voltaire, Candide

“All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”
― Saint Gregory Of Nyssa

“One becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Christians and the Law-Courts

“These are the few ways we can practice humility:

To speak as little as possible of one's self.

To mind one's own business.

Not to want to manage other people's affairs.

To avoid curiosity.

To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.

To pass over the mistakes of others.

To accept insults and injuries.

To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.

To be kind and gentle even under provocation.

Never to stand on one's dignity.

To choose always the hardest.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living

“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”
― Roland Barthes

“When our society lost this communal network, many aspects of our culture died, including the fact that we lost contact with older family members who could give us perspective on our lives. Without that perspective, we’ve become overscheduled, hyperstimulated, and culturally grumpy. We are so burdened by the pace of our lives that when we must interact with older people who cannot keep up, we run out of patience trying to fit them into our schedules. We have forgotten—or never learned—how to value our senior adults’ advice. As they begin to slow down, we push them aside so they don’t impede our progress. While we may accomplish a lot every day, we don’t necessarily feel good about our achievements because no one is there to tell us about the longer-term implications of choices we make. Many of us assume some things about senior adults that aren’t true, and then can’t understand why we aren’t getting along better with this aging population.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“Age is an opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“the behavior we see as “diminished” in elderly parents, clients, and friends actually exists to do a very specific developmental job.”
― David Solie, How to Say It® to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap with Our Elders

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
― Rumi

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“But there's no such thing as a completely fresh start. Everything new arrives on the heels of something old, and every beginning comes at the cost of an ending.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, The Geography of You and Me

“For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“THE OLD MAN IN THE CORNER

The man in the corner
Is dying with words
He's crying to be heard
His days are marked
And his only ears are birds
He knows the secret to peace
And his experience bleeds and hurts
Somebody stop and listen
Before he departs the earth!
Somebody write his thoughts
Before he hits the turf!
His eyes are closing their shutters
And he just dropped his
Beads and stick.
His breath is leaving us.
Please!
Somebody hear him out quick!
A little girl rushes to him and
Picks up his cane of wood.
The old man then turns to her
And faintly whispers,
"The key to peace is
To always stay fair
And be good.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.”
― René Magritte

“Everyday objects shriek aloud.”
― René Magritte