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W Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All W Quotes

“We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest "must-haves", whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they "have" to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.”

“We think we know how to listen. But often our minds wander, and the next thing we know we're thinking about things not happening in the room...Really listening requires being in your body. You listen with your ears, your sense of hearing, of course, but at the highest level, you can listen with almost a sixth sense.”

“We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.”

“We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them - we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation, of driving and dressing, how they touch a sugar cube to their coffee and stare as it turns white to brown, then drop it, satisfied, into the cup. I watched my own husband do that every morning; I was a vigilant wife. We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know. We try to get past it to the original, but we never can. We have seen it all. But what have we really understood?”

“We think we need to be ‘positive’ all the time and so we numb down the thoughts and feelings that are deemed ‘negative’ by our external conditioning. It is scary to strip ourselves back and tear down the walls of lies, lack and limits we built our adult lives upon. Yet it is only by courageously searching through the dungeons of our elemental darkness that we can find our supreme light.”

“We think we only die at the end of our physical life but really, we die every day. Every decision we make that moves us in a new direction is a death. Every emotional release we experience is a death. Every idea we let go of is a death. Every memory we begin to see differently is a death.”

“We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”