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“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”
― Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
― Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
“It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― All the Bright Places
― All the Bright Places
“Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”
― Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
― Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts
― The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts
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