Maymona > Maymona's Quotes

“ليس أتعس من الحظ السيء إلا الرضا به”
― نجيب محفوظ

“The funny thing is, I don't care too much. You think you love something so badly, but when it's gone you find out you don't care so much.”
― Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor

“In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“إن تعاسة الإنسان تنتج من كونه لا يريد أن يقبع ساكناً في غرفته هناك حيث يجب أن يكون.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“كنت لأود الانتحار لولا كرهي للجثث. لماذا يجب على من يحبونني ان يتعاملوا مع جثتي؟”
― إيفان كليما, No Saints or Angels

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.”
― Julia Child

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
― Julia Child

“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Over the few decades, we have invented countless time saving machines that are supposed to make like more relaxed - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות

“Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“...the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“I had come to the conclusion that I must really be French, only no one had ever informed me of this fact. I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“The German birds didn't taste as good as their French cousins, nor did the frozen Dutch chickens we bought in the local supermarkets. The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made,” he said. “Even after you eat it, it stays with you—always.” I”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“smarter people tend to think more like economists”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Committing to the wrong thing is better than standing still.”
― Jeff Goins, The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do

“Pivoting isn’t plan B; it’s part of the process.”
― Jeff Goins, The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do