Mark Connely > Mark's Quotes

“Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.

I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.

Thus Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind, was really a sharper and more stinging judge, to my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin, shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he considered us incapable of doing either good or evil....

Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“No spirited mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its power of achievement.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”
― Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

“Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul’s interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

- The Mower”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“We search our entire lives to create a genuine and reliable self that can relate with other people and faithfully express our artistic temperament. Our battle for personal authenticity requires us to penetrate layers of self-deception, conquer ego defense mechanism, and destroy a false self that is intent upon meeting other people’s expectations.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Most of us think that being authentic is about being true to what we want and who we are, without regard for the impact it has on others. On the contrary, the authentic self is an intelligence at the core of who we are that is inspired, centered, and connected to those we lead. When we are in this centered place of being we are able to choose behavior that serves the greatest good.”
― Henna Inam, Wired for Authenticity: Seven Practices to Inspire, Adapt, & Lead

“One of the telltale signs of one who has completely embraced their authentic self is that they are, with great consistency, the same person in public as they are behind closed doors. Until you learn how to access your authentic voice, the uniqueness of who you truly are will never be fully realized. What makes you special (just like everyone else) is that you were placed here on this planet to express the one-of-a-kind being only you can be.”
― Dennis Merritt Jones, Your Redefining Moments: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“I am a massive slag!" I think to myself, in a motivational way. "I'm a Lady Sex Adventuress! I'm a Pirate of Privates! I'm a swashfuckler!" ... I think of "Teenage Whore" by Courtney Love as my personal anthem.”
― Caitlin Moran

“Here, I believe, was mercy; and, lying very close to it, the root of the novelist’s art. The novel’s structure is a structure of suggnômê—of the penetration of the life of another into one’s own imagination and heart. It is a form of imaginative and emotional receptivity, in which the reader, following the author’s lead, comes to be inhabited by the tangled complexities and struggles of other concrete lives.54 Novels do not withhold all moral judgment, and they contain villains as well as heroes. But for any character with whom the form invites our participatory identification, the motives for mercy are engendered in the structure of literary perception itself. VII.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. A second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. A first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”
― A.A. Milne

“Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
― Galileo Galilei

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.”
― Emma Goldman

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage

“Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.”
― Aesop

“The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Do you know, the only people I can have a conversation with are the Jews? At least when they quote scripture at you they are not merely repeating something some priest has babbled in their ear. They have the great merit of disagreeing with nearly everything I say. In fact, they disagree with almost everything they say themselves. And most importantly, they don't think that shouting strengthens their argument.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.”
― Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal