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Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson

American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Born on May 25, 1803, and died on April 27, 1882. Known for his transcendentalist philosophy, his works have had a profound impact on literature and the intellectual world. more

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“If a car can represent something, this one represents contradiction. For most of his life, my dad has been able to have any woman he wants. In response, he’s gone through as many as possible, betraying each for someone younger and more absurd. Conversely, for most of his life he’s been able to have any car he wants, too. In response, he’s remained married to this, a 1982 Porsche with a tricky clutch.”

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“It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls' Reunion looked for. Often, in fact nearly always, it was an uninteresting ring, sometimes no more than the plain gold band or the very smallest and dimmest of diamonds. Perhaps the husband was also of this variety, but as he was not seen at this female gathering he could only be imagined, and somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.”

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“Contempt is born when we fixate on our spouse’s weaknesses. Every spouse has these sore points. If you want to find them, without a doubt you will. If you want to obsess about them, they’ll grow – but you won’t! Jesus provides a remedy that is stunning in its simplicity yet foreboding in its difficulty. He tells us to take the plank out of our own eye before we try to remove the speck from our neighbor’s eye (see Matthew 7:3–5). If you’re thinking “but my spouse is the one who has the plank,” allow me to let you in on a secret: You’re exactly the type of person Jesus is talking to. You’re the one He wanted to challenge with these words. Jesus isn’t helping us resolve legal matters here; He’s urging us to adopt humble spirits. He wants us to cast off the contempt – to have contempt for the contempt – and learn the spiritual secret of respect. Consider the type of people Jesus loved in the days He walked on earth – Judas (the betrayer); the woman at the well (a sexual libertine); Zacchaeus (the conniving financial cheat); and many others like them. In spite of the fact that Jesus was without sin and these people were very much steeped in sin, Jesus still honored them. He washed Judas’s feet; He spent time talking respectfully to the woman at the well; He went to Zacchaeus’s house for dinner. Jesus, the only perfect human being to live on this earth, moved toward sinful people; He asks us to do the same, beginning with the one closest to us – our spouse.”

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Book:Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?
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“In this regard, Daisy reflected, her marriage to Matthew would not be unlike Lillian's with Westcliff. As two strong-willed people with very different sensibilities, Lillian and Westcliff often argued and negotiated... and yet this didn't seem to weaken their marriage. Quite the opposite, in fact- their union seemed all the better for it. She considered her friends' marriages... Annabelle and Mr. Hunt as a harmony of similar dispositions... Evie and Lord St. Vincent with their opposite natures, as necessary to each other's existence as day and night. It was impossible to say that any of these pairings was superior to the others. Perhaps, in spite of all she had heard about the ideal of a perfect marriage, there was no such thing. Perhaps every marriage was a unique creation.”

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“So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way. The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear—until he was saying “I love you” and she was saying “Really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying “I’m sorry, of course you’re right,” and “Whatever you think is best,” and “You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world,” and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums—earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together on this thing” when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn’t even like—Shep Campbell!—and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were. (p.416-7)”

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Book:Revolutionary Road
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