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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had been brought up. She knew that the support of religion was possible only upon condition of renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of life. She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm at the new spiritual condition, never experienced before, in which she found herself. She felt as though everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly knew that times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.”

“The idea of self-determination was gradually given credibility by international law, and it lent strong emancipatory support to movements of liberation struggling against a West-centric world order. Latin American countries used international law creatively, both to limit the protection of foreign investment by establishing the primacy of national sovereignty in relation to natural resources, and by building support for the norm on non-intervention in internal affairs.”

“The idea of self-effacement, the idea that you feel so powerless that the only tiny morsel of power you have is over your own ability to deny yourself food - that to me is a very profound and sad methodology and indicator of how powerless a lot of people feel in this world. That they will turn that onto themselves until they are physically smaller. I think it's affected my worldview a lot - just being sensitive and empathetic towards the ways people want to be small. I don't wish smallness for anyone.”

“The idea of separating church and state by the Founding Fathers of America was freedom from the domination of one form of religion, because many of them left England, because they were persecuted by the church, because they want to express their Christian faith in a different way. So it was a bit of warfare between Christians.”

“The idea of sin being able to deceive us, suppressing truth so that we believe a lie, should send shivers down our spines. It is one thing to deceive other people. That is scary enough. It is even more frightening when we realize that each lie we tell leaves us more self-deceived. All practiced sin teaches us to believe lies. WE don't often consider the boomerang effect of our deception. In the end it will get us.”

“The idea of social performance, that we're always performing identities, is something I got fairly obsessed with. I think it's probably because I am a person who went to 15 different elementary and middle schools. I moved all the time, often having to run out in the middle of the night because my mom couldn't pay the bills. There were schools where I'd be the poor loser kid. There were schools where I'd suddenly be the smart kid or the cool kid, although that was very seldom.”

“The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple. . .We may say, in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit, . . .so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest admiration. If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to refute Socialism, but we cannot thrust it carelessly aside.”

“The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.”

“The idea of spending money, of buying myself something lovely but unnecessary, has always burdened me. Is it because my father would scrupulously count out his coins, and rub his fingers over every bill before giving me one in case there was another stuck to it? Who hated eating out, who wouldn't order even a cup of tea in a coffee bar because a box of tea bags in the supermarket cost the same? Was it my parents' strict tutelage that prompts me to always choose the least-expensive dress, greeting card, dish on the menu? To look at the tag before the item on the rack, the way people look at the descriptions of paintings in a museum before lifting their eyes to the work?”

“The idea of suggesting that Hannibal Lecter - in the book, he has a sixth finger and red eyes, and so there is a devilry in Thomas Harris' presentation - so it felt like it was completely honest and appropriate for the character. And we often talk in the writers' room, "Okay, there is the Hannibal as the devil explanation of that plot point, but we also need to ground that in a reality that is answerable to the physics of the storytelling."”

“The idea of suicide, understandable as it is, does not seem commendable to me. We live in order to gain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness. As long as life is possible, even if only in a minimal degree, you should hang onto it, in order to scoop it up for the purpose of conscious development. To interrupt life before its time is to bring to a standstill an experiment which we have not set up. We have found ourselves in the midst of it and must carry it through to the end.”

“The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle”

“The idea of the Absolute implies perfection. Absolute is impossible if it is not perfect. Nevertheless, is it possible to conceive anything perfect? Everything that exists has shortcomings. Even if we imagine something as perfect, it cannot be absolute perfection. It does not capture the whole and can only exist in relation to other phenomena. The world is exposed to change at any moment and does not function as an absolute perfection but as a flaw, evolution, and development.”