Emma > Emma's Quotes

“You choose to give up or make an effort. There are only these two choices for humans to choose from. You have to honestly tell them your feelings. The rest is up to them. To make an effort, or to give up would then be their choice. It was the same for you. It’s the same for everyone.”
― Chica Umino

“I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they “owe them their lives” (a telling phrase) because they haven’t been killed.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.”
― Max Gunther, How to Get Lucky (Harriman Classics): 13 techniques for discovering and taking advantage of life’s good breaks

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
― Albert Ellis

“There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well . And the world must be easy.”
― Albert Ellis

“Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.”
― Albert Ellis, PhD

“Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

“When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“A man is held to be criminal,sometimes, by the great ones of the earth,not because he has committed a crime himself but because he knows of one which has been committed.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask

“Happiness even makes the wicked good.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
― Frederic Bastiat

“There is no growth without real feeling. Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body and Soul

“Old Mother God, Old Father God— they keep us trapped. And we do give up. We pull the covers over our head, and go back to sleep. Only to dream of old dragons, old alligators, old crocodiles drinking our blood. To dream of cold-eyed lawmakers saying, This is the way it's always been done. It works. It will stay this way. And you will obey.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body & Soul

“Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child. There's personal anger, but underneath there's often universal rage; and when we are possessed, God help the man who's on the end of that. Deep rage is not about the man; Deep rage is this: Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever heard me. As long as I can remember, I've had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told, That's not what you think, that's not what you ought to do. So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That's deep rage. We have lived our lives behind a mask. Sooner or later —if we are lucky— the mask will be smashed. What a relief to be human instead of the god or goddess my parents imagined me to be or I imagined them.”
― Marion Woodman

“Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“I have heard women complain about men holding doors for them,, as if it is inherently offensive and implies that they are weak. ... I would hold a door for anyone. ... It has to do with noticing our fellow human beings and saying, "I recognize that you're on this planet, and I don't want a door hitting you in the face.”
― Tim Gunn, Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

“An idea can only become a reality once it is broken down into organized, actionable elements.”
― Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“You believe in love, just as a child believes in Santa Claus or a fairy tale.”
“What is love then, if not a fairy tale meant for adults?”
― Abhaidev, That Thing About You

“Father xmas is like the love from a prostitute, it doesn’t exist and it makes you spend loads of money.”
― Alain Bremond-Torrent, running is flying intermittently

“The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as "different." The tribe will declare us "weird" or "queer" or "crazy." The tribe will reject us. Here's the truth: the tribe doesn't give a shit. There is no tribe. That gang or posse that we imagine is sustaining us by the bonds we share is in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as fucked up as we are and just as terrified. Each individual is so caught up in his own bullshit that he doesn't have two seconds to worry about yours or mine, or to reject or diminish us because of it. When we truly understand that the tribe doesn't give a damn, we're free. There is no tribe, and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us.”
― Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro

“The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle