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Settling Quotes

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Settling Quotes

“An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.”

“I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public affairs and councils governed by foolish servants. I have known great ministers, distinguished for wit and learning, who preferred none but dunces. I have known men of valor cowards to their wives. I have known men of cunning perpetually cheated. I knew three ministers who would exactly compute and settle the accounts of a kingdom, wholly ignorant of their own economy.”

“In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very center of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law.”

“The argument culture urges us to approach the world - and the people in it - in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as 'both sides'; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize.”

“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”

“From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.”

“Any kind of creativity is not settling down into a happy little space. I don't try to be mellow or anything. I think I have quite... my voice is what it is, no matter what I'm singing, it's always going to sound like me. There's not too far I could go. I sound like myself. I hope that I haven't put any boundaries on anything.”

“My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a hardening, or settling process. Education is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves.”

“There are only three things to say about cocaine. One, there is no such thing as enough. Two, it will never be as good as the first time. Three, those first two facts constitute a tragedy of expense in ways that can't be experienced unless you've had cocaine. ... Your brain will settle into a puddle around your sinuses and you will die.”

“If you have older children who avoid you like the plague, buy yourself some expensive bath salts, run a hot tub, and settle in for a long soak. Teenagers who haven't talked to you since their tenth birthday will bang on the door, demanding your immediate attention.”

“It is not possible to be truly balanced in one's views of an abuser and an abused woman. As Dr. Judith Herman explains eloquently in her masterwork Trauma and Recovery, “neutrality” actually serves the interests of the perpetrator much more than those of the victim and so is not neutral. Although an abuser prefers to have you wholeheartedly on his side, he will settle contentedly for your decision to take a middle stance. To him, that means you see the couple's problems as partly her fault and partly his fault, which means it isn't abuse.”

“I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.”

“In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work with expecting immediate reward, to love without an instant satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. It is only when we are detached from ourselves that we can be at peace with ourselves.”

“I try when I'm writing to fill my head and my ears with all sorts of stuff and then let it settle and filter through. At a certain point it seems like fruitless activity because you're taking a lot of time and not seeming to get anything. And then, slowly, you realize you've actually digested elements and that your thinking is being freed up and the way you build up compositions is changed as a result of what you've been listening to.”

“Don't settle for comfortable misery, a sad state where you're hanging on to what is most predictable and familiar at the risk of letting exciting opportunities pass you by.”

“There's a gentle sigh which descends like billowing silk upon the soul that accepts its coming death. It's a gentle pocket of air in the turbulence of everyday life... the silk settles around you as if it has been drifting towards the earth forever and has finally found it's target. The flag of defeat has been mercifully dropped and, in this action, the loss is not so bad. Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat, and death is swallowed up in victory.”

“I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared.”