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Self Indulgence Quotes

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Self Indulgence Quotes

“Monsters are real. Maybe they’re not supernatural or satanic beings, maybe they don’t take unnatural forms, and maybe they don’t feed on human flesh or blood, but they do exist, and humanity is powerless against them. Humans are inherently lazy, fragile, weak, cowardly, pathetic, self-centered, self-indulgent, and self-destructive. Very few have what it takes to overcome these flaws. The only thing that can kill a monster is a bigger monster.”

“He was indeed the epitome of contemporary scientists who, like Mathieu and Einstein himself, as soon as they had achieved some decisive scientific triumph, would start immediately to sign every possible protest against its consequences, running in circles and tearing their hair, whining that theirs was “labor of love,” a pure, disinterested pursuit and that, in Kaiser Wilhelm’s words after he saw the carnage of the First World War, which he had started, “ich habe das nicht gewollt,” that “this is not what I wanted.” Mathieu hated them almost as much as he hated himself. He was one of them, a full ranking member of the club, and this awareness was eating him alive. His only trace of dignity lay in the fact that he was not lying to himself about it. He knew that research, scientific pursuit was a compulsion, and inner must, and an addiction and that the attitude that consists in passing the buck to society as far as the practical consequences of ”pure,” “disinterested,” scientific accomplishment were concerned was mere whitewash, alibi and a refusal to acknowledge both responsibility and self indulgence.”

“The real difference in the believer who follows Christ and has mortified his will and died after the old man in Christ, is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence and knows that his arrogance must be eradicated. Hence there is a need for daily self-discipline.”

“When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.”

“Our assumptions and expressive elucidations of an intermeshed external universe make up our internal world of thought. How we perceive the world in turn makes up the continued evolution of the rust resistant self. Formulation of a mutable sense of self causes us humbly to take into account our human frailty. Active awareness of our feebleness provides us an apt sense of perspective that our personal wants and woes are trifle matters. While we routinely suppress the knowledge of our ultimate fate in order to maintain the steam to power through the turbulence of each day. The constant whisper of death advancing is what drives all people to perform acts that transcend the banality of everyday living and place an artistic stamp upon their lives. An ethical person attempts to live in that sweet spot half way between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification.”

“Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn't a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.”

“A consumerism credo is a poor substitute for liberty, human dignity, and personal integrity; pursing a hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle proved spiritually enslaving. Rather than pointing its aim at raising the moral consciousness of individual persons and our community, consumerism gives its blessing to basking in wanton self-indulgence”

“People stick hearts on Valentine's cards and get married in white dresses and give each other flowers. They think love is every-thing going right. That's not love. That's self-indulgence. That's good luck. Love is when you walk into the burning building. Love is when the person who means most to you in the world is breathing through a mask and pissing in a bag. Love is when they no longer know your name.”

“Atrocities are now shown in 30-second bites. Hardcore artistic horror is an expression of hating your neighbour. The gruesome imagination feeds on vanity, lust, self-indulgence and despair, rather than the hope of the Holy Spirit. The Body of Christ needs to look and repent of our own fallenness.... Whatever arena Christians withdraw from goes to hell.”

“New pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as conspicuous elements of the American character.”

“Remember there is always a limit to self-indulgence, none to restraint... Civilization , in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment , and increases the capacity for service .”

“When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.”

“Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?”

“So, let us, you and I, for the sake of our brother man, individually strive by example and influence to lift the standard of thought and conduct from the low level of selfishness and self-indulgence up to the lofty realms of aspirational thought and self-denial.”

“Writing is an art but also a craft, which means it's a job. I don't teach. This is how the groceries get on the table. You sometimes make creative sacrifices to get the job done. All that said, I'm looking forward to getting out of the two-book-a-year schedule I'm on and to getting some self-indulgence going.”

“From the 5th grade through the 4th year of college, our young people are being indoctrinated with a Marxist philosophy and I am fearful of the harvest. The younger generation is further to the left than most adults realize. The old concepts of our Founding Fathers are scoffed and jeered at by young moderns whose goals appear to be the destruction of integrity and virtue, and the glorification of pleasure, thrills, and self-indulgence.”

“The concept of emotional or spiritual survival has an honorable history, but it does invite self-indulgence. In my own case, the worst I ever survived was severe personal and political confusion, the temptation to various sorts of craziness and a couple of bad acid trips. It felt pretty horrendous at the time, and some of it was even dangerous, but Auschwitz it wasn't.”

“... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.”