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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The observer effect puts our everyday perceptions and assumptions in a blender. It dictates—if we’re to be honest with ourselves, sober in our thinking, and not reactionary in our emotions—that the world we see is NOT the ultimate reality, but merely a projection of it. From this perspective the manifest world is revealed as what Hindu mystics referred to as maya, illusion, the imaginal outpourings of minds—like children naturally playing in magical constructs that seem eminently real—simply doing what minds do.”

“The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it. Recognition of this contact is the fact that even the soul does not know of itself. Hence it must remain unknown. That would be sad only if there were anything apart from the soul, but there is nothing else.”

“The observer self, a part of who we really are, is that part of us that is watching both our false self and our True Self. We might say that it even watches us when we watch. It is our Consciousness, it is the core experience of our Child Within. It thus cannot be watched—at least by anything or any being that we know of on this earth. It transcends our five senses, our co-dependent self and all other lower, though necessary parts, of us. Adult children may confuse their observer self with a kind of defense they may have used to avoid their Real Self and all of its feelings. One might call this defense “false observer self” since its awareness is clouded. It is unfocused as it “spaces” or “numbs out.” It denies and distorts our Child Within, and is often judgmental.”

“The obsession with food filled my childhood - that's what happens when your parents are from a place or time where people really might starve. In America, my Jordanian father spent decades cooking professionally and pursuing his dream of a restaurant, and it was one of the central ways that he explained himself to his American children. Even though he's a passionate talker, he has a hell of a time with listening. His cooking gave him a way of having a conversation - which was a really interesting thing for a writer to look at.”

“The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold.”

“The obsession with past trauma refracts World Lit’s sense of belatedness, even when the genre advertises its contemporaneity. You can argue that we’re still haunted by Hiroshima or the Holocaust, that people refuse to speak about this haunting — kind of the way they refuse to care about the novel. Past horrors, unlike contemporary ones, also tend to be events liberal readers agree about. But they displace the contemporary world, locating politics always elsewhere, in some distant geography and irrecoverable past. Present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized.”

“The obsession with seeking in Africa's colonial past the causes of all its miseries today is the work of people intimately convinced that Africa is doomed, that it is unable to take care of itself today, and that, finally, the fate of the Black will only improve if the White comes back to repair what he has done wrong: these “hidden Afro- pessimists “ are hiding, under gratuitous accusations, anger, or demand for reparation, their own disarray. This explains why their words are sterile, never accompanied by proposals for solutions to the problems they evoke. They are doing a lot of harm to Africa because they divert issues that have worth.”

“The obsessive desire for a passionate relationship is usually a reflection of a lack of love for oneself. The manic need to pursue a passionate career is rooted in an intense unhappiness with present reality. They are a series of soothing thoughts and deflection methods and escape routes: The monster everyone’s running from, of course, is themselves.”

“The obsessive documentation is itself adjacent to hyper-consumption in our society. The desire to just have everything all the time and adjacent to that is - it might be a little hokey but - a certain loss of identity that then only gets sort of found or ascribed to these moments that are documented. If so much of your experience is devoted to the thought of documentation, you're already sort of spinning out this narrative from this moment that you are attempting to control instead of just experiencing it.”

“The obstacles to peace are in the minds and hearts of men. In the study of matter we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why we succeed in dealing with it. But about the things we care for — which are ourselves, our desires and lusts, our patriotisms and hates — we find a harder test of thinking straight and truly. Yet there is the greater need. Only by intellectual rectitude and in that field shall we be saved. There is no refuge but in truth, in human intelligence, in the unconquerable mind of man.”

“The obstacles were intended to be a distraction from the goal. You must keep a persistence focus to realise the goal.”