Juan Morillo > Recent Status Updates

“…how much more grievous are what fits of anger and the consequent sorrows bring than the actual things are which produce in us those angry fit and sorrows.”

“And yet, what difficulty do these things present? If they are what Nature wills, rejoice in them and you will find them easy: if they are not, look for what your own nature wills and hasten to this, even should it bring you no glory; for every man is pardoned if he seeks his own good.”

“Don’t roust your faith bird-high an’ you won’t do no crawlin’ with the worms.”

“So damn much happens in four years if you’re away.”

Granma and granpa raced each other to get across the broad yard. They fought over everything, and loved and needed the fighting

But now, by saying what his future was going to be like, he had created it. A plan is a real thing and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities, never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked. Thus Kino’s future was real, but having set it up, other forces were set up to destroy it, and this he knew, so that he had t prepare to meet the attack.

“Those are the flowers of Spanish chivalry. What a people they have been. What sons of bitches from Cortez, Pizarro, Menéndez de Avila all down through Enrique Lister to Pablo. And wha wonderful people. There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder people and no crueler… Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain has never been a Christian country.”

“When you have been concentrating so hard on something you can’t stop and your brain gets to racing like a flywheel with the weight gone. You better just not think.”

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find out when the time comes.”

“If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.”

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

“To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of draught. How can the American Negro’s past be used?”

“If Harlem didn’t have so many churches and junkies, there’d be blood flowing in the streets.”

“One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief.”

“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes and hypocrisies of the Christian Church.”

“In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.”

“One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man.”

I can see in this book the inspiration for Hemingway’s use of the internal monologue exemplified in The Old Man and the Sea. Particularly in the use of “no” to answer a question asked by the narrator.

“…If you love the people, their hearts become compliant. And if you are impartially devoted to the common good, their hearts become people become willing to serve. Compliance, and willingness to serve are what makes good government.”

Xu Zheng said, “In the past and present, the models and regulations upon which the state was established have varied from dynasty to dynasty. But the most important thing was always to win the hearts of All Under Heaven. And to win the hearts of All Under Heaven is nothing other than to show love and an impartial devotion to the common good…” (continue in the next)

“Whenever you desire to cheer yourself, think upon the merits of those who are alive with you; the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third, of another some other gift. For nothing is so cheering as the images of the virtues shining in the character of contemporaries, and meeting so far as possible in a group. Therefore you should keep them ready to your hand.”

“we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of
pain.”

“When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created. When people see things as good, evil is created.”

You either control your mind, or it controls you.

Talking about hexing and psychology, and its relationship to mind control:

“The spell only works because the victim believes that spells can be cast, and that it’s possible he or she could be hexed. When the hexed victim is informed that someone has casted a spell on them, they accept that it is possible, and their mind does the rest.”

Utnapishtam said, “there is no permanence. Do we build a house for it to stand forever? Do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep forever? Does the flood time of rivers endure? It is only the nymph of the dragonfly who sheds her larvae and sees the sun in his glory. From the days of old, there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are.

“The person who makes persistence his or her watchword discovers that failure finally becomes tired and makes its departure. Failure cannot cope with persistence.”

“In no Chinese epoch of imperial times, therefore, are there historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, who were writing for themselves. In China, history was written to endorse the assumption of the Mandate of Heaven.”

“…practically all the great fortunes began either from selling personal services or from the sale of ideas. When you think about it, what else except ideas and personal services can you give in return for riches if you don’t have products or property?”

“It has been said that no book, not even the Bible, has influenced so many people for so long as his Analects, his ‘Sayings’, which have shaped the intelectual and cultural life of the whole of East Asia, Japan and Korea.”

- Talking about Confucius