Fred Ayres > Recent Status Updates

“Though - what am I saying? - everyone does it; it’s their sickness everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone.”

“Facing everything noble and elementary in the world, she united her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes with the movement of the stars. Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: “On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.”

“Most men cannot prove they are not mediocre.”

“it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if it was to do so, he realized he must submit to time, that to come to terms with time is one of the most magnified and the most dangerous of experiments”

“Mersault turned the corner and again recognised the smell of cucumbers. And with the smell his suffering”

“Someone within me is struggling to lift a great weight, to cast off the mind by overcoming habit, laziness, necessity.
I do not know from where he comes or where he goes. I clutch at his onward march in my ephemeral breast, I listen to his panting struggle, I shudder when I touch him.”

Of the two, I choose the ascending path. Why? For no intelligible reason, without any certainty. I know how ineffectual the mind and all the certainties of man can be in this moment of crisis.
I chose the ascending path because my heart drives me toward it. “Upward! Upward! Upward!” my heart shouts, and I follow it trustingly.

“Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.' Socrates therefore has no fear of the court which is trying him. He will not stoop to dishonourable behaviour in order to win acquittal, for 'the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong, which is far more fleet of foot'.”

“as Wordsworth wrote in h Intimations of Immortality, 'our birth is but a sleep and, forgetting. Wordsworth was not particularly thinking about geometry, but he liked the general idea.”

“to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not
No one knows with regard to death whether it is really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man, but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil, and this ignorance”

📚 👀

Reading way too many books rn however a family member recommended the audiobook. As a person into self-improvement, I have found that it’s a good listen for everyday tasks.

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

Hard read. Having to watch multiple YouTube vids and summaries online.

“To lose someone you love is something you’ll regard as the hardest blow of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home…for even if they grown again they are replaced. ‘But their successors will never be quite the same.’ No, and neither will be you.”

“Thus it is that foresight, the greatest blessing humanity has been given, is transformed into a curse. Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped then worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come.”

“‘How’s the patient?’ he asked Derby.
‘Dead to the world.’
‘But not actually dead.’
‘No.’
‘How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.’”

“Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.”

“Soon you will have forgotten all things: soon all things will have forgotten of you.”