“
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.
”
”
Lance Morrow (The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons)
“
The pas has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
“
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.
”
”
André Maurois
“
The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
Being able to return to the books was a sanctuary for my heart. And a joy bolted free, lessening my own grievances, forgiving spent youth and dying dreams lost to a hard life, the hard land, and to folks’ hard thoughts and partialities.
”
”
Kim Michele Richardson (The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek)
“
Forgiveness is not a matter of exonerating people who have hurt you. They may not deserve exoneration. Forgiveness means cleansing your soul of the bitterness of ‘what might have been,’ ‘what should have been,’ and ‘what didn’t have to happen.’ Someone has defined forgiveness as ‘giving up all hope of having had a better past.’ What’s past is past and there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. There are perhaps no sadder people then the men and women who have a grievance against the world because of something that happened years ago and have let that memory sour their view of life ever since.
”
”
Harold S. Kushner (Overcoming Life's Disappointments)
“
We are not perfect. The people around us are not perfect. People do things that annoy, disappoint, and anger. In this mortal life it will always be that way. Nevertheless, we must let go of our grievances. Part of the purpose of mortality is to learn how to let go of such things. That is the Lord’s way. Remember, heaven is filled with those who have this in common: They are forgiven. And they forgive.
”
”
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“
It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead (Gilead, #1))
“
Before, I thought we could write about life only when we had recovered from our wounds; when we were able to touch old sores with a pen and not revive the pain; when we could look back free from nostalgia, madness, and a sense of grievance.
But is this really possible? We are never completely cut off from our memory. Recollections provides the inspiration for writing, the stimulus for painting, and for some, the motivation even for death.
”
”
Ahlam Mosteghanemi
“
What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
”
”
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
“
That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
Passionate hatreds can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. These people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.
”
”
Eric Hoffer
“
The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
”
”
Hannah Arendt
“
This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
Too many of us die without knowing transcendent joy, in part because we pursue one form or another of materialism. We seek meaning in possessions, in pursuit of cosmic justice for earthly grievances, in the acquisition of power over others. But one day Death reveals that life is wasted in these cold passions, because zealotry of any kind precludes love except of the thing that is idolized.
”
”
Dean Koontz (A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog)
“
Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures.
”
”
Richard Matheson (The Shrinking Man)
“
Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P
”
”
Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
“
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It ia a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
In trying moments, you must keep trying... In grieving times, don't think of giving up! Employ your passion to work; something great to enjoy is approaching!
”
”
Israelmore Ayivor (Daily Drive 365)
“
No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods.
”
”
Michael D. O'Brien (A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind)
“
You see the profound effect literature can have on life? Who says it's all a waste of time? If only I could produce one book that left someone with that kind of ferocious grievance. If you have read one of my books, you probably feel cheated out of however much money it might have cost you, and you'll certainly begrudge the time you wasted on it. But even at my most bullish and self-aggrandizing, I can't quite make myself believe that I've actually wrecked someone's life. Any documentary evidence to the contrary will be gratefully received.
”
”
Nick Hornby (Housekeeping vs. the Dirt)
“
Don’t try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
“
There is no need to complain of particular grievances, for life in its entirety is lamentable.
”
”
Seneca
“
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.
”
”
Michael Foley (The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy)
“
In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows,
”
”
Anthony Trollope (The Warden)
“
This is the true joy in life — being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
Five years ago, I said vows. And I believe in vows. I meant them, and not just when I said them out loud for an audience to hear but as a motto and a life choice. For as long as we both shall live. I hadn't anticipated the sandy flow of feeling, the yin-yang of love and dread, or the residual buildup of grievances and the slow draining of the benefit of doubt. In good times and in bad. Yes, sure, but in my naivete, I interpreted this as external; we would support each other when the world imposed and intruded. No one tells you that it's the internal that's the real challenge: those moments of decisiveness equal to taking a vow, when you feel the clawing grip of your pormises.
”
”
Julie Buxbaum (After You)
“
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget... Here we are on this earth, with only a few decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.
”
”
André Maurois
“
Is that how grievance works? I've given you the best years of my life! But for a gift you don't expect a return. And who would she have given them to otherwise, those years?
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Robber Bride)
“
the first core value—We don’t whine—and its corresponding quote, courtesy of playwright George Bernard Shaw: “The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
“
I am only a shadow, sitting by the gates of Hades beside that arrogant Ulysses
telling stories of my grievances to my father’s indifferent ghost
who, from time to time, gusts an ash wind at me
and whispers
son, for the nonsense you talk pour me even a drop of life
this shit hole of eternity
suffocates terribly
”
”
Sigitas Parulskis
“
Continually remind yourself that you are a mortal being, and someday will die. This will inspire you not to waste precious time in fruitless activities, like stewing over grievances and striving after possessions.
”
”
Epictetus (The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life)
“
Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
“
terrified of being abandoned and all narcissists need Narcissistic Supply Sources. These narcissists prefer to direct their furious rage at people who are meaningless to them and whose withdrawal will not constitute a threat to the narcissists' precariously-balanced personalities. They explode at an underling, yell at a waitress, or berate a taxi driver. Alternatively, they sulk (silent treatment). Many narcissists feel anhedonic, or pathologically bored, drink or do drugs - all forms of self-directed aggression. From time to time, no longer able to pretend and to suppress their rage, they have it out with the real source of their anger. Then they lose all vestiges of self-control and rave like lunatics. They shout incoherently, make absurd accusations, distort facts, and air long-suppressed grievances, allegations and suspicions. These episodes are followed by periods of saccharine sentimentality and excessive flattering and submissiveness towards the target of the latest rage attack. Driven by the mortal fear of being abandoned or ignored, the narcissist debases and demeans himself to the point of provoking repulsion in the beholder. These pendulum-like emotional swings make life with the narcissist exhausting.
”
”
Sam Vaknin (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited)
“
If there are any among us who are at their wit’s end, they ought to try for once to put aside all their grievances and perhaps even all their petitions and simply praise God, in order to turn their hearts to the end of the ways of God, where the eternal liturgy resounds in heaven. Nothing so changes us—precisely in the darkest moments of life—as the praise of God.
”
”
Helmut Thielicke (Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer (Minister's paperback library))
“
Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition - past, present or future - that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind's refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control. Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life - to allow life to live through you.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
George Bernard Shaw said in Man and Superman: “This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
Dave Burgess (Teach Like a PIRATE: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator)
“
Most serious confrontations in life are not political, they are existential. One can agree with someone's political stance but disagree in a fundamental way with how they came to that position. It is a question of attitude, of moral configuration. My husband and I had plenty of grievances, but it all boiled down to a fundamental difference in the way we perceived life, the context within which we defined ourselves and our world. For that, there was no reconciliation or resolution, there was only separation or surrender.
”
”
Azar Nafisi (Things I've Been Silent About)
“
This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
All this is the more maddening, as Edward Shils has pointed out, in a populistic culture which has always set a premium on government by the common man and through the common judgement and which believes deeply in the sacred character of publicity. Here the politician expresses what a large part of the public feels. The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by applauding the politicians as the pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser. There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes, or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.
”
”
Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)
“
I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.
”
”
Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England)
“
Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life — to allow life to live through you.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
For the Irish, life is a matter of perpetual grievance. We remember the Famine, but forget the Draft Riots. We seal off our neighborhoods to strangers, but allow our own priests to victimize our own children. We worship violence and we enslave ourselves to alcohol, we lie and steal and kill without conscience for generations at a time. But it's all right in the end, and do you know why? Because we don't tolerate lust.
”
”
Mary Gordon (The Other Side (Contemporary American Fiction))
“
If I were to name the one crying evil of American life, Mr. Derrick, it would be the indifference of the better people to public affairs. It is so in all our great centres. There are other great trusts, God knows, in the United States besides our own dear P. and S.W. Railroad. Every state has its own grievance. If it is not a railroad trust, it is a sugar trust, or an oil trust, or an industrial trust, that exploits the People, because the people allow it. The indifference of the People is the opportunity of the despot. It is as true as that the whole is greater than the part, and the maxim is so old that it is trite - it is laughable. It is neglected and disused for the sake of some new ingenious and complicated theory, some wonderful scheme of reorganization, the fact remains, nevertheless, simple, fundamental, everlasting. The People have but to say 'No' and not the strongest tyranny, political, religious, or financial, that was ever organized, could survive one week.
”
”
Frank Norris (The Octopus: A Story of California)
“
Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow, to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own—to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egotism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being very selfish.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
“
Darkness, grievances and all painful emotions are the realm of the unknown. They are not horrible issues to hide or something wrong that needs to be fixed. When darkness comes into our life, this is a major opportunity to move beyond our bogus self and embrace the mystery of who we truly are.
”
”
Franco Santoro
“
Whatever talents, gifts, opportunities, happiness, and blessings someone has, are granted by God. Some people for whatever reason are bothered by those touched by His grace. There's nothing you can do about that. They should bring those grievances directly to Him. If they really feel that way, that talk is overdue anyway.
”
”
Carlos Wallace (Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments into Your Greatest Blessings)
“
Fortunately, life, which was more powerful than their mockery and whose sweet and strengthening milk he had not fully drained, held out its breast to dissuade him. And he resumed drinking with a joyous voracity, his rich and credulous imagination listening naïvely to the grievances of that ravenousness and making wonderful amends for its blighted hopes.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Pleasures and Days)
“
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
“
The fewer moments we have to look forward to in life, the more valuable they become. Past grievances and preoccupations often dissipate, and what’s left is what we have before us.
”
”
Robert Waldinger (The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness)
“
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
”
”
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
“
The true joy in life is to be a force of Fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little child of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget... Here we are on this earth, with only a few decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.
”
”
André Maurois
“
often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget … Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to Stop Worrying and start Living)
“
What, my good Sir, is this span of life, that a passenger through it should seek to overturn the interests of others to establish her own? And can the single life be a grievance? Can it be destitute of the noblest tendernesses?
”
”
Samuel Richardson (Complete Works of Samuel Richardson)
“
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one: being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
Sometimes I picture my heart like the carry-on suitcase I dream I carry around the world. There's not enough room for everything in that carry-on. So I must choose carefully, wisely. I could pack the pain I have felt in the past, especially dealing with Mom. I could stuff all those grievances into my bag and drag them with me on my adventure-but that's a lot of weight to carry. So I carry with me the things I do love about my mom-her whimsical, childlike spirit, her positive attitude, her love for animals, her love for me.
”
”
Lauren Fern Watt (Gizelle's Bucket List: My Life with a Very Large Dog)
“
The more I try to explain, to list the tiny
grievances that added up to an intolerable day in my life, the more I sound
unhinged. A man hissed at me on the bus. A bunch of teenagers loudly
discussed whether I was really a guy. A girl I knew only on the Internet left
a suicide note. The cashier at Whole Foods smirkingly called me “bro.” The
TV at the nail salon, playing soundlessly, featured some nonsensical ghoul
that I realized, with a shock, was someone’s idea of a trans woman,
someone’s idea of me. The guy at the local corner store revealed that he
knew where I lived and shrugged when I asked how: “Everyone around
here knows about you.” And now, I get irritated at one thing, a free drink,
and I sound crazy complaining about that, right? Some total loony acting
traumatized ’cause a bartender tried to be kind.
”
”
Torrey Peters (Stag Dance)
“
If enslaved to the desire for wealth, let this go. If enslaved by grievance, turn the cheek. If your significance is in being mother or father or wife or husband or child or in having any of these—indeed, if you cling even to your own life—these too let go. Have instead a new mind set upon the kingdom. Do not be anxious, but rather repent—see beyond your old mind, you see? Only have eyes to see what is true beyond what you think. Trust the Father. Then you will master this world with pleasure rather than be mastered by it. Then you will find the power to command any storm.
”
”
Ted Dekker (A.D. 30 (A.D., #1))
“
It’s a delicate thing to initiate change in a traditional culture. It has to be done with the utmost care and respect. Transparency is crucial. Grievances must be heard. Failures must be acknowledged. Local people have to lead. Shared goals have to be emphasized. Messages have to appeal to people’s experience. The practice has to work clearly and quickly, and it’s important to emphasize the science. If love were enough to save a life, no mother would ever bury her baby—we need the science as well. But the way you deliver the science is just as important as the science itself.
”
”
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
“
Everything we say, do, and think, aligns us with darkness or light, love or grievance. Thus everything is a spiritual practice, whether we are aware of it or not. We are constantly, in every moment, aligning with one way of being or another. The choice is ours to make each moment of the day.
”
”
Ted Dekker (The Forgotten Way Meditations: The Path of Yeshua for Power and Peace in This Life)
“
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
”
”
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)
“
Ideological agendas in public schools absorb time, energy and resources that are especially needed in the education of young people from a cultural background often lacking in many of the things that youngsters in more fortunate circumstances can take for granted— such as highly educated parents, books in the home and a whole way of life that prepares them in childhood for achievements as adults.
Propagandists in the classroom are a luxury that the poor can afford leas of all. While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Charter Schools and Their Enemies)
“
On New Year’s Eve of 1976, Trump proposed to Ivana, later presenting her with a three-carat Tiffany diamond ring. But before there could be a wedding, less than a year after they met, there was the prenup—ultimately, as many as four or five contracts. The negotiations between Trump and Ivana—Roy Cohn urged Donald to begin married life with codified financial arrangements—followed a pattern that came to define Trumpism: boasts of wealth and influence, a highly public airing of grievances, and dramatic battles staged in gossip columns and courtrooms. The marriage would start—and later explode—to the accompaniment of lawyers.
”
”
Michael Kranish (Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President)
“
But how ridiculous that I should bereft simply because I couldn’t spend hours in my world of make-believe! Wasn’t the reality of my life interesting enough? This is surely the time to let go of grievances, I told myself sternly. What good does it do to dwell on them? Brooding on a nest of grudges will only hatch more grief.
”
”
Liza Dalby
“
Healing takes time, and its duration cannot be controlled.
Some people are angry with us, or we are angry with them.
Some people leave us, or we leave them.
All this hurts, and takes time to heal.
We don't have power over the amount of time it takes to heal all these grievances.
Yet, no matter how powerless we are over the time it takes to heal, we do have all the power that truly matters.
And this is the power to say YES to Healing.
This is the greatest power possible,
for when we say YES to healing,
time disappears.
And then there is only the YES,
which is the power of choice to heal.
Time is always filled with grievances,
because through time people come and go from our life,
and we come and go from theirs.
When time ends,
Healing begins.
And time can end now,
if you say YES to Healing.
And if you say YES to Healing,
you are with everyone and everyone is with you,
unconditionally, right now, and forever.
Hence, I do say YES to Healing,
and, if you wish,
you can also join me,
for I love to Heal with you.
”
”
Franco Santoro
“
- I’ve never been so sick of RACE in my life.
Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be restored and redressed. Even everyday WASPS compete now. Because their sense of being dispossessed, displaced, bullied, has in an amazingly short time become as acute, as outraged, as righteous as that of the groups they managed and mangled for so long.
- This is my dream. Eradicate them all. Then fix your hair, and put your hands in your muff as your heels go clip clip clip across the pavement.
- May I help you, ma’am?
- Thank your, sir, I’ve just murdered quite a few people and I need a taxi.
”
”
Margo Jefferson (Negroland)
“
Scatter the herbs across the table, sit together, and pick off the tender stems and leaves. There is a meditative rhythm and ritual to it all. It's one of those rare times we are asked to slow down, and we are able to converse, to commiserate, to gossip, to air out grievances, to share secrets and dreams. Life happens in these spaces, amid a field of greens.
”
”
Naz Deravian (Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories)
“
Some people get easily turned aside from the grandeur of their life-work by pursuing their own grievances and enemies, until their life gets turned into one little petty whirl of warfare. It is like a nest of hornets. You may disperse the hornets, but you will probably get terribly stung, and get nothing for your pains, for even their honey is not worth a search.
”
”
A.B. Simpson (Days of Heaven Upon Earth)
“
THE WOLF AND THE LAMB
A Wolf came upon a Lamb straying from the flock, and felt some compunction about taking the life of so helpless a creature without some plausible excuse; so he cast about for a grievance and said at last, "Last year, sirrah, you grossly insulted me." "That is impossible, sir," bleated the Lamb, "for I wasn't born then." "Well," retorted the Wolf, "you feed in my pastures." "That cannot be," replied the Lamb, "for I have never yet tasted grass." "You drink from my spring, then," continued the Wolf. "Indeed, sir," said the poor Lamb, "I have never yet drunk anything but my mother's milk." "Well, anyhow," said the Wolf, "I'm not going without my dinner": and he sprang upon the Lamb and devoured it without more ado.
”
”
Aesop (Aesop's Fables)
“
The 4th Way is based on understanding. The Work is the 4th Way—that is, it is not the Way of Fakir or the Way of Monk, or the Way of Yogi. In this Work understanding is the most powerful thing you can develop. Therefore it is necessary to begin to to try to understand what this Work teaches and see for oneself why it teaches it. What does that mean? It means in brief that you must understand for yourself why negative emotions must go, understand why self-justifying must go, why lying and deceit must go, why internal considering and grievances and making internal accounts must go. (Notice the Lord's Prayer says: "Forgive us as we forgive others.") You must understand for yourself why egotistical phantasies must go, why self-pity and sad regrets must go, why hating must go, why the state of inner sleep must go, why ignorance must go, why buffers and attitudes and pictures of yourself must go, why False Personality, with its two giants walking in front of you, Pride and Vanity, must go, why ignorance of oneself must be replaced by real uncritical self-knowledge through observation, why external considering is always necessary, and finally you must understand and see why Self-Remembering is utterly and totally necessary for you at all times if you want to awaken from the great sleep-inducing power of nature and the increasing mass-hypnotism of external life. All this is the Work and what it teaches —namely, what it is we have to do in order to awaken from the state of sleep in which we live.
”
”
Maurice Nicoll (Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3)
“
Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own (Classics To Go))
“
If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser with his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.
”
”
Joe Abercrombie (Sharp Ends (First Law World, #7))
“
Grievances and any horror in life are seeds waiting for either manifestation into the physical world or transformation into the multidimensional realm. Grievances regularly emerge in our consciousness as emotions and thoughts. They are massive collective ancestral forces that keep being recycled and fermented. They cannot be eliminated because they constitute the source of our creative energy. Yet we can prevent them from manifesting and becoming our reality if we direct them towards the reality we choose to create.
This is possible if we consciously descend at the deepest level where grievances exist as seeds, experiencing them with total awareness and gaining complete access to the related thoughts and emotions. This allows us to become catalysing conduits of such grievances with the capacity to direct them consciously towards the reality we choose to create. When this is the case grievances are transformed and their separated energy fades away.
”
”
Franco Santoro
“
Gretchen Rubin
The sense of thankfulness, appreciating the grandeur of everyday life, just the ordinary day, and really taking the time to take it in is absolutely crucial. And then when you have that thankfulness, so many other negative emotions get washed away—resentment, anger, grievances, and grudges—because you’re just so thankful for what you have. Also, it’s better with a sense of humor. It helps me keep my sense of humor, because it helps me keep my sense of perspective.
”
”
Oprah Winfrey (The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights from Super Soul Conversations)
“
In our day to day life we go through various activities which may involve high work pressure and high workload and as per us, we feel that this burden of work is resulting in causing frustration. Though we don't realize that it is not the workload which causes this frustration and annoyance but rather it is our negligence in the proper management of that work.
If you avoid mismanagement of your work and duties you are likely to face frustration, annoyance, and grievance much lesser.
”
”
Prashant Agarwal
“
In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large.
The gates of the rich occasionally rattled, remained class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
”
”
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
“
Disraeli said: “Life is too short to be little.” “Those words,” said André Maurois in This Week magazine, “have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget…. Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to Stop Worrying and Start Living)
“
I came to realize that this was about more than not offering up what some of his opponents craved—the picture of the angry black man, or the lectures on race that fuel a sense of grievance among white voters. Obama also didn’t want to offer up gauzy words to make well-meaning white people feel better. The fact that he was a black president wasn’t going to bring life back to an unarmed black kid who was shot, or alter structural inequities in housing, education, and incarceration in our states and cities. It wasn’t going to change the investment of powerful interests in a system that sought to deny voting rights, or to cast people on food stamps working minimum wage jobs as “takers,” incapable of making it on their own. The “last person who ever thought that Barack Obama’s election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some “end of race” in America was Barack Obama. That was a white person’s concept imposed upon his campaign. I know because I was once one of them, taking delight in writing words about American progress, concluding in the applause line “And that is why I can stand before you as president of the United States.” But he couldn’t offer up absolution for America’s racial sins, or transform American society in four or eight years.
”
”
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
“
For hundreds of years the quiet sobbing of an oppressed people had been unheard by millions of white Americans—the bitterness of the Negroes' lives remote and unfelt except by a sensitive few. Suddenly last summer the silence was broken. The lament became a shout and then a roar and for months no American, white or Negro, was insulated or unaware. The stride toward freedom lengthened and accelerated into a gallop, while the whole nation looked on. White America was forced to face the ugly facts of life as the Negro thrust himself into the consciousness of the country, and dramatized his grievances on a thousand brightly lighted stages.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
“
When a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long established prosperity, life becomes more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be… they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping… they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office…. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob rule. —Polybius, Histories, VI
”
”
Calder Walton (Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West)
“
We are able to overcome grievances towards others when we understand that everyone is acting from their own fallible experiences in life. You can only react to anything, from your own storage of life experience that's happened to you thus far. No one can possibly react to anything beyond their own personal storage box of life. That's why it's bound to be fallible, bound to hurt someone else who's coming from somewhere else, and that's also why sometimes something explodes! Nothing is ever personally about us. We all look back ten years later and then see what we could have said or done differently. Better. It's the same way for everybody, and that's how we can let things go.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
Many of the beneficiaries of the welfare state have sought to fill the void with drugs, sex, violence and other self-indulgences, or joining in mob rampages over the grievance du jour. Far from an assurance of subsistence producing a relaxed sense of security and contentment, it seems instead to have produced a sense of inchoate grievance against a society that has left them adrift, with no intrinsically meaningful role in life, while others have both meaningful achievements and visibly higher standards of living than whatever is given to them as basic necessities—and all this amid unceasing emphasis on invidious comparisons and on how wrong it is that some have so much more than others.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
“
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing but his parent’s lives are changing too. Like a habitat, abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are. For 18 years he has experienced their existence only in so far as it is related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he's not around? What secrets do they hold from each other? What aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances held in check by the shared project of child rearing will now in his absence, lurch into the light?
”
”
Justin Cronin (The City of Mirrors (The Passage, #3))
“
The deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition are best revealed by the other enthusiasms of its devotees: hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt, implacable opposition to New Deal reforms, desire to banish or destroy the United Nations, anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, isolationism, a passion for the repeal of the income tax, fear of poisoning by fluoridation of the water system, opposition to modernism in the churches. McCarthy’s own expression, “twenty years of treason,” suggested the long-standing grievances that were nursed by the crusaders, though the right-wing spokesman, Frank Chodorov, put it in better perspective when he said that the betrayal of the United States had really begun in 1913 with the passage of the income-tax amendment.
”
”
Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)
“
What rubbish, mon père. Does he think God actually answers prayers? God has no time to listen to petty grievances. Did he think that God would drop everything to look into his little life? Did he hope for divine intervention every time something went wrong? You see, this is the problem, mon père. People take things too literally. They expect the universe to revolve around their little preoccupations. They have no sense of the scale of things, no sense of their own insignificance. So God didn’t answer your prayers? Do not imagine you are alone. God doesn’t care that you are alone, or that you are suffering. If God made the stars, then why would He care whether or not you fast for Lent, or whether you drink alcohol, or even if you live or die—
”
”
Joanne Harris (The Strawberry Thief (Chocolat, #4))
“
What they sang had occurred to him before, but this thought had somehow sat behind other thoughts in his head and flashed timidly, like a distant lantern in misty weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s grievances lay in his conscience too; to be reconciled with the fact that these people, submissive to their lot, heaped on themselves what was heaviest and darkest in life — how terrible it was! To be reconciled with that, and to wish for oneself a bright, boisterous life among happy, contented people, and to dream constantly of such a life, meant to dream of new suicides by overworked, careworn people, or by weak neglected people, whom one sometimes talked about with vexation or mockery over dinner, but whom one did not go to help.
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov)
“
committing suicide, both for your own sake and that of your companions. Both sexually and socially the polar explorer must make up his mind to be starved. To what extent can hard work, or what may be called dramatic imagination, provide a substitute? Compare our thoughts on the march; our food dreams at night; the primitive way in which the loss of a crumb of biscuit may give a lasting sense of grievance. Night after night I bought big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield station, but always woke before I got a mouthful to my lips; some companions who were not so highly strung were more fortunate, and ate their phantom meals. And the darkness, accompanied it may be almost continually by howling blizzards which prevent you seeing your hand before your face. Life in such surroundings is both mentally and physically cramped; open-air exercise is restricted and in blizzards quite impossible, and you realize how much you lose by your inability to see the world about you when you are out-of-doors. I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide, you should take that man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do the rest. To normal people like ourselves living under abnormal circumstances Nature could do much to lift our thoughts out of the rut of everyday affairs, but she loses much of her healing power when she cannot be seen, but only felt, and when that feeling is intensely uncomfortable. Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which
”
”
Apsley Cherry-Garrard (The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913)
“
Nixon’s unwavering pragmatism did not work with everyone. From the moment he arrived in Washington, he exuded such odor of personal ambition that the old order was offended. Bob Taft never forgave him for helping to tilt the nomination to Ike. But that personal grievance aside, Taft had not liked him anyway—for Nixon seemed to represent something new and raw in the Senate. To Taft, he was “a little man in a big hurry.” Goldwater later wrote that he was “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Even J. Edgar Hoover, who was so helpful to Nixon during the Hiss case and whom Nixon worked hard courting, decided early on that Nixon tended to take too much credit for himself. Hoover’s closest aide, Clyde Tolson, wrote in a memo to the director that Nixon “plays both sides against the middle.” Hoover noted on the same memo, “I agree.
”
”
David Halberstam (The Fifties)
“
Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then perhaps, in his own good time, after the scenes of accusation had reached their crescendo and he had flogged Coleman to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive. He thought Coleman was going to stay here till the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before the eyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigorously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually. The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle—is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold.
”
”
Philip Roth (The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3))
“
These seasons of suffering have a way of exposing the deepest parts of ourselves and reminding us that we’re not the people we thought we were. People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display. There is another layer to them they have been neglecting, a substrate where the dark wounds, and most powerful yearnings live.
Some shrivel in the face of this kind of suffering. They seem to get more afraid and more resentful. They shrink away from their inner depths in fear. Their lives become smaller and lonelier. We all know old people who nurse eternal grievances. They don’t get the respect they deserve. They live their lives as an endless tantrum about some wrong done to them long ago.
But for others, this valley is the making of them. The season of suffering interrupts the superficial flow of everyday life. They see deeper into themselves and realize that down in the substrate, flowing from all the tender places, there is a fundamental ability to care, a yearning to transcend the self and care for others. And when they have encountered this yearning, they are ready to become a whole person.
”
”
David Brooks
“
Distance from the troubled past is the product of economic and social change more than reflection or the mere passage of time, which may have little effect. To the extent that the basic circumstances of life remain unchanged, time becomes irrelevant; in fact, it may even deepen the hold of former attitudes, turning them into ancient truths. But as the foundations of social reality alter and the circumstances of daily life take on a new character, society can more easily accept hard truths and discard old controversies. It gains an ability to leave its past in the past and move into a different future.
[...] The desire of a few individuals to “overcome the past,” to rise above enmity and engage a different future after a destructive war, is laudable but rarely is achievable for an entire society. Substantial numbers of people will defend old positions or insist on the validity of their grievances, and the next generation may revive propaganda or condemn efforts to “forget.” Eventually, however, the world moves on, and changed realities allow acceptance of bitter truths about a troubled past. As progressively greater numbers acknowledge the past, historical wounds close, even those of bloody civil war [192—93].
”
”
Paul D. Escott (Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States)
“
Yes, we are on the way back. Back to wives, sweethearts, children, parents, and friends. Back to the ways of peace. Yet we can never go back, only forward. We will not find conditions just as we left them. The buildings, the land, the trees will still be there, but we cannot exp ect to find people unchanged. Those with whom we worked and played, many will not be there, others will have developed new friends, new interests, different habits. Even we ourselves will not be quite the same. Men who have had to face the probability of death day after day, week after week, will always look at life through different eyes. The normal man will have a keener appreciation of the values that contribute to life. He will appreciate many kindly, true, and beautiful influences we had, before the war, taken for granted. The near-neurotics will try to make the world give them a living, will more and more tend to live in the past, nursing their grievances, pathetic creatures who won a war and lost their souls. Shipmates, we cannot go back, only forward. All of us having a lot of living yet to do. We can make the years ahead great in accomplishment, rich, satisfaction. We had what it takes to win a tough war, we cannot fail to win our personal victory when we return to the ways of peace. May you all be blessed with that inner strength and peace which the world can neither give nor take away.32
”
”
Barrett Tillman (When the Shooting Stopped: August 1945)
“
And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat. If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own (Classics To Go))
“
Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, "cynical" strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the 'eighties or earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for instance, was spectacular. For several years the old—young antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and "God save the Queen" rather than steel helmets and "Hang the Kaiser." And he was satisfyingly anti-Christian—he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.
”
”
George Orwell (All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
“
3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy—if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed. 4. In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: ‘I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.’ Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
“
A consistent theme of the New Testament is that we have been bought. Paul tells it to the Corinthians twice, in two different contexts (1 Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23). Paul calls himself a servant, a bondservant, or a slave of Christ in nearly every epistle that he wrote. Both Peter and Paul tell us that the church and individual believers are a possession of God (Titus 2:14 and 1 Peter 2:9). Regardless of whether the context is personal freedom, sexual morality, life in the fellowship of believers, or anything else, we are not our own. We belong to Another. When that really sinks into a believer’s heart, it is a profound revelation. A living sacrifice—in other words, a true worshiper—does not claim his own rights. He does not complain about slights and grievances, because he knows that his Master has ordained them and may even be using them for marvelous purposes. He bypasses the world and its desires. He throws his own personal agenda in the trash, no matter how many goals and dreams and preferences are on it. He does not make out his own schedule, he does not consider any possession his own, he does not make decisions from human reasoning, and he does not maintain any self-interest in his relationships with other people. He disregards the cultural warnings that too much selflessness is unhealthy, because his health is not the issue. God alone is the issue. His will, His character, His plans, and His providence are paramount. IN DEED We know better than to assume any of us have lived up to that ideal. But it’s still the goal, isn’t it? A heart that truly worships another is a heart that has completely abandoned itself. Most of the stresses of life come from threats to our self-interest. But if we have no self-interest, where is the stress? The heart that has abandoned itself to God is at rest. It has learned to love the eternal over the world. It lives in peace forever.
”
”
Chris Tiegreen (The One Year Worship the King Devotional: 365 Daily Bible Readings to Inspire Praise)
“
Affirmative action is the crowning, debilitating insult. Blacks must be helped at every stage in life, from Head Start to college recruitment, to job quotas, to race-based promotions. How can this help but sap the efforts of even the most hardworking? How can it help but insult real achievements? Affirmative action also gives whites a genuine grievance. Maybe the generation of judges who turned the Civil Rights Act upside down felt guilty. Maybe they were guilty. But the young white men they are now punishing for the sins of their ancestors are not guilty—though if they object to an unjust system that discriminates against them, they will be pelted with charges of racism.
”
”
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
“
If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser through his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.
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Joe Abercrombie (Sharp Ends)
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The Union, as it was designed in the Constitution, stood firmly committed to protecting planters from the dangers intrinsic in their slave-based society—in fact, such protection was a foundational element of the United States of America. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence prominently showcased black politics—and not in the section about the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rather, Thomas Jefferson’s final and most significant grievance with the British government was the British crown’s threat to incite a slave revolt if the colonists did not fall in line.
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Daniel Rasmussen (American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt)
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Governor Seymour of New York, a man of great force and character, said, in reviewing his life: "If I were to wipe out twenty acts, what should they be? Should it be my business mistakes, my foolish acts (for I suppose all do foolish acts occasionally), my grievances? No; for, after all, these are the very things by which I have profited. So I finally concluded I should expunge, instead of my mistakes, my triumphs. I could not afford to dismiss the tonic of mortification, the refinement of sorrow; I needed them every one.
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Orison Swett Marden (An Iron Will (Cosimo Classics Personal Development))
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grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of “what someone did to me” or “what someone did to us.” A grievance
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
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Maybe it is just easier to focus on life’s trivial missteps when the real challenges feel so insurmountable. But by doing this aren’t we also exhausting ourselves on petty grievances and leaving nothing in the tank for the real issues?
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Ashley Dotty Charles
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Zizhang asked, “What is keen discernment?” Confucius said, “When slanders that seep under the skin and grievances that cause pain do not drive you to an immediate response, you may be said to have keen discernment.
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Annping Chin (The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics)
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I wonder what brought us here?
The analogy of our situation or the void we want to fill? Perhaps, our previous journey was a complete sham; both stuck in the atrocities of the past; impotent to move on from our former grievances and after all this time, we meet again. Maybe, this time it will be different; maybe this time we won't repeat the same mistakes we made; maybe this time we'll do better; maybe this time we'll be better.
But what if we didn't? What if this contemporary start of our new era destroyed us now more than ever? The question begs itself and the rest is silence!
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Kamil Alvi
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We can air our grievances in life, or we can try to understand other people's. Anna's a smart person. She does the really hard work with Tully and then he goes off and makes a plan with somebody else. It's a thing men do. Not the end of the world, but you can't expect her to like it.
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Andrew O'Hagan (Mayflies)
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You are not who you think you are.
There are things buried inside you that whisper. They give you words you speak as your own, and they nudge you, lead you, seduce you into thoughts they want you to have. You have formed decisions from their memories and acted from their grievances. They are ghosts that live within you, peeking out from your eyes. They squat in your skin, clouding and morphing what you think, what you see, what you feel.
You are, quite simply, not just you. Rather, you are a haphazard, haunted mosaic of a hundred shards of glass. A physical treasure box of experienced lifetimes. A sea of souls trapped in flesh.
The fragmented remains of others past live within you. And if you aren’t careful, like a puppeteer to a marionette, they will twitch, and you will move.
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Crystal Oakman (The Imprint: The unintended inheritance that's shaping your life)
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Had Washington’s military career ended with the French and Indian War, he would have earned scarcely more than a footnote in history, yet it is impossible to imagine his life without this important preamble. The British Empire had committed a major blunder by spurning the talents of such a natural leader. It said something about the imperial system that it could find no satisfactory place for this loyal, able, and ambitious young subject. The proud Washington had been forced to bow and scrape for a regular commission, and it irked him that he had to grovel for recognition. Washington’s military career would be held in abeyance until June 1775, but in the meantime he had acquired a powerful storehouse of grievances that would fuel his later rage with England.
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Ron Chernow (Washington: A Life)
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The family or the village was small enough so that individuals within it were not powerless. Even where all authority was theoretically vested in the paterfamilias, in practice he could not retain his power unless he listened and responded to the grievances and problems of the individual members of his family. Today, however, we are at the mercy of organizations, such as corporations, governments, and political parties, that are too large to be responsive to single individuals. These organizations leave us a great deal of latitude where harmless recreational activities are concerned, but they keep under their own control the life-and-death issues on which our existence depends. With respect to these issues, individuals are powerless.
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Chad A. Haag (The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology)
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We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.
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Joseph Bottum
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Democracy in America has been in existence and flourished for over two centuries, but over this time the political culture has not remained static but changed and evolved. Slowly, often imperceptively, there has been a turn toward law and politics as the primary way of understanding all aspects of collective life. Nothing catalyzed this tendency more than the Depression-era New Deal. The tendency now effects conservatives every bit as much as it does liberals; those who favor small government as it does those who want a larger government. It has affected everyone’s language, imagination, and expectations, not least conservatives who, like others, look to law, policy, and political process as the structure and resolution to their concerns and grievances; who look to politics as the framework of self-validation and self-understanding and ideology as the framework for understanding others. It is my contention that Nietzsche was mostly right; that while the will to power has always been present, American democracy increasingly operates within a political culture—that is, a framework of meaning—that sanctions a will to domination. This, in turn, is fueled by a political psychology of fear, anger, negation, and revenge over perceived wrongs.
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James Davison Hunter (To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World)
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Amelia went to the parlor windows and watched the two distant figures proceed through the orchard toward the forest. The apple trees, frosted with light green buds and white blossoms, soon conspired to hide the pair from view.
She puzzled over the way Beatrix had behaved with the stern-faced soldier, pecking and chirping at him, almost as if she were trying to remind him of something he’d forgotten.
Cam joined her at the window, standing behind her. She leaned back against him, taking comfort in her husband’s steady, strong presence. One of his hands glided along her front. She shivered in pleasure at the casual sensuality of his touch.
“Poor man,” Amelia murmured, thinking of Phelan’s haunting eyes. “I didn’t recognize him at first. I wonder if he knows how much he has changed?”
Cam’s lips played lightly at her temple as he replied. “I suspect he is realizing it now that he’s home.”
“He was very charming before. Now he seems so austere. And the way he stares sometimes, as if he’s looking right through one…”
“He’s spent two years burying his friends,” Cam replied quietly. “And he’s taken part in the kind of close combat that makes a man as hard as nails.” He paused reflectively. “Some of it you can’t leave behind. The faces of the men you kill stay with you forever.”
Knowing that he was remembering a particular episode of his own past, Amelia turned and hugged herself close to him.
“The Rom don’t believe in war,” Cam said against her hair. “Conflict, arguing, fighting, yes. But not in taking the life of a man with whom one has no personal grievance. Which is one of many reasons why I would not make a good soldier.”
“But for those same reasons, you make a very good husband.”
Cam’s arms tightened around her, and he whispered something in Romany. Although she didn’t understand the words, the rough-soft sound of them caused her nerves to tingle.
Amelia nestled closer. With her cheek against his chest, she reflected aloud, “It’s obvious that Beatrix is fascinated by Captain Phelan.”
“She’s always been drawn to wounded creatures.”
“The wounded ones are often the most dangerous.”
His hand moved in a soothing stroke along her spine. “We’ll keep a close watch on her, monisha.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
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Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Writing is a solitary venture. Making use of a soundless void in the vortex of time the author enters the realm of restoration, an undertaking where he or she explores that private psychic space of the self. In this mystical state of heightened awareness, the writer investigates the soul’s grievances, and diagnoses and treats their grim afflictions.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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A scolded mouse knows no grievance.
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Andy Harglesis
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The emotional states associated with the heart include some that every life would benefit from: Empathy, which makes us feel what someone else is feeling Compassion, which motivates us to extend lovingkindness Forgiveness, which wipes the slate clean of old grievances and wounding Sacrifice, which allows us to put someone else’s good above our own Devotion, which inspires reverence for higher values None of these states is a term in cardiology, yet they have medical consequences
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Deepak Chopra (The Healing Self: Supercharge your immune system and stay well for life)
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As pointed out by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey: We seekers look at one another with growing smiles. We’ve won the right to be called heroes. For the sake of the home tribe we faced death, tasted it, and yet lived. From the depths of terror we suddenly shoot up to victory. It’s time to fill our empty bellies and raise our voices around the campfire to sing of our deeds. Old wounds and grievances are forgotten. The story of our journey is already being woven. You pull apart from the rest, strangely quiet. In the leaping shadows you remember those who didn’t make it, and you notice something. You’re different. You’ve changed. Part of you has died and something new has been born. You and the world will never seem the same.
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Steve Kamb (Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story)
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In December 1861, upset at her exclusion from a family party, she informed him that “while ruminating this morning upon all my grievances and the indignities I had endured I inadvertantly said S__ t upon him.”17 While never as open with her complaints as Augusta Adams, Emmeline Free resented the fact that Amelia Folsom became her husband’s preferred consort. She lived the last few years of her life as an invalid, a “dope fiend” addicted to morphine, according to Young’s daughter Susa. The ledger of Young’s family store documents Emmeline’s frequent acquisition of morphine, a common relief for many chronic illnesses in the late nineteenth century. Young’s correspondence reveals an ongoing concern for Emmeline’s welfare. In December 1874, for example, Young telegraphed Emmeline from St. George, encouraging her to “ferment” and then take some medicinal roots. Despite such attempts, she died in 1875.18
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John G. Turner (Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet)
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life is very short, and keeping grievances takes so much energy, it’s not worth it. If you don’t make something positive for yourself at least, what you have is wasted, gone, and you can’t get it back. One thing
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Jane Marks (The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust)
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Life is like a sandwich! Regard birth as one slice, and death as the other. What you put in between the slices is up to you.
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Shilpa Pitroda (Grievances Of Life)
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Let me explain. More often than not, we feel that our freedom is limited by our circumstances: the restrictions imposed on us by society, the obligations of all kinds that other people lay upon us, this or that physical or health limitation, and so on. To find our freedom, we imagine we have to get rid of those restrictions and limitations. When we feel stifled or trapped in some way by circumstances, we resent the institutions or the people that seem to be their cause. How many grievances we have toward everything in life that doesn’t go as we wish, and so prevents us from being as free as we would desire! That way of seeing things contains a degree of truth. Sometimes certain limitations need to be remedied, restrictions overcome, in order to attain freedom. But there is also much here that is mistaken and needs to be unmasked if we are ever to taste true freedom. Even if everything we consider as preventing our freedom disappeared, that would be no guarantee that we would find the full freedom we aspire to. When we push back the boundaries, more boundaries always lie a little farther on. We risk finding ourselves forever dissatisfied. We shall always come up against painful restrictions. We can overcome a certain number, but some are inflexible: physical laws, the limitations of our human condition and of life in society, and plenty more.
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Jacques Philippe (Interior Freedom)
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At times life orchestrates a very efficent, yet rather painful, modality to allow us to release grievances and judgements towards some people. It consists in slowly setting the stage for us to be in the same circumstances, which eventually lead us to behave exactly like those people.
Each time we express hard judgments regarding what is wrong with others, a complex and long series of events is activated till we reach the moment when we can see our own finger pointing against us.
There is also another way, the most efficent and painless, which does not require any complexity and long orchestration, for it simply takes place in the present. It consists in abstaining right from the beginning from any judgement towards others.
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Franco Santoro
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Repeatedly Yates went berserk—raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing.
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Blake Bailey (A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates)
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A demigod who reaches his apotheosis never mourns for himself.
It is the business of his many adulators to mourn for him. He cannot feel sadness to be so great, leaving all the rest of us to champion in trembling misery.
I, surprisingly, have very few words to offer, only because this year has taken so many sensational performers from us. There comes a time when the agony of loss is too great, when we feel it too much-- there is nothing left but painful astonishment. My grievances lie more with the Gods for taking him away from us than they do with his parting. I suppose I shall reach the stage of unconscionable sorrow at some point; now I am half confusion and half indignation. It should be impossible for people to be so deeply affected by someone whom we have never formally met, but this is existence: it is a bold measure we take, this stake in sufferance; we must all go through everything together, another proof of the mask of division. We all feel the same things, and Prince's passing is felt no less by anybody. Between him and Bowie, there is now a musical chasm in the world, a place where Gods once dwelt that is now abandoned, and in the Age of Pseudolotry, where what is nonsensical reigns over what is intelligent, we are likely never to see one of his kind again.
Goodnight, sweet Prince. We shall go on trundling through this 'thing called life' with hearts defrauded of our greatest love.
--On the death of Prince
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Michelle Franklin
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What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace. As
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
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This is the true joy in life: being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
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David Richo (The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them)
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the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional.
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
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Spread joy. Become a beacon of hope and love. Settle down your differences and talk it out. Don’t let grievances spoil your faith and in turn spoil your heart.
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Sulaiman Dawood (White Lies (The Pinnacle of Deception, #1))
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The happiest people in the world cry over the smallest grievances.
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Neha Yazmin
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I thought of our situation, living under a tyranny; of the character of the country we were in; of the length of the voyage, and of the uncertainty attending our return to America; and then, if we should return, of the prospect of obtaining justice and satisfaction for these poor men; and vowed that if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one. The
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Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea)
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By senior year, Anson’s athletes know all twelve by heart, beginning with the first core value—We don’t whine—and its corresponding quote, courtesy of playwright George Bernard Shaw: “The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
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Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
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The development of entitlement since the 1970s coincides exactly with a steady rise in personal debt. If you are entitled to a certain lifestyle then borrowing the money to fund it is simply claiming what is rightfully yours – and there is no obligation to pay it back. So the lender attempting to recover money is an ugly bully harassing an innocent victim. Attitudes to debt are a great example of how cultural conditioning can change: not so long ago debt was a sin, then an unpleasant necessity for buying a home, then the way to fund a deserved lifestyle and finally something so obviously good that only a fool would refuse it. At this stage the debt house of cards became so ridiculously huge that the removal of one card was almost enough to destroy the world’s financial systems. And, of course, everyone blamed the bankers for the disastrous consequences. Drag out the bankers and hang them!
The problem with an overwhelming sense of entitlement is that it promises satisfaction but usually delivers its opposite. Entitlement encourages all three of Albert Ellis’s disastrous ‘musts’ – ’ I must succeed’, ‘Everyone must treat me well’, ‘The world must be easy’. And when none of these happens, the conclusion is not that the demands were unjustified but that malign, powerful, hidden forces are denying them. So the sense of entitlement becomes a sense of bitter grievance.
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Michael Foley (The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy)
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Let there be light. Gen. 1:3 Let there be enlightenment; let there be understanding. Darkness. Gen. 1:4 Ignorance; lack of enlightenment and understanding. Eden. Gen. 2:8 A delightful place; temporal life. Garden. Gen. 2:8 Metaphorically—a wife; a family. Tree of life in the midst of the garden. Gen. 2:9 Sex; posterity, progeny. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Gen. 2:9 Moral law; the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life. Gen. 2:9 Eternal life. The tree of good and evil. Gen. 2:17 Metaphorically—sexual relationship. Good. Gen. 2:17 Anything perfect. Evil. Gen. 2:17 Anything imperfect; contrary to good; immature. Naked. Gen. 2:25 Exposed; ashamed. Serpent. Gen. 3:1 An enemy; deception. Thorns and thistles. Gen. 3:18 Grievances and difficulties. Sent forth from the garden. Gen. 3:23 A loss of harmony; a lost paradise. God took him away. Gen. 5:24 He died painlessly. He had a heart attack. Sons of God. Gen. 6:2 Good men; the descendants of Seth. My spirit shall not dwell in man forever. Gen. 6:3 I have become weary and impatient. (A scribal note.) The Lord was sorry that He made man. Gen. 6:6 (A scribal note. See Old Testament Light—Lamsa.) I set my bow in the clouds. Gen. 9:13 I set the rainbow in the sky. I have lifted up my hands. Gen. 14:22 I am taking a solemn oath. Thy seed. Gen. 17:7 Your offspring; your teaching. Angels. Gen. 19:1 God’s counsel; spirits; God’s thoughts. Looking behind. Gen. 19:17 Regretting; wasting time. A pillar of salt. Gen. 19:26 Lifeless; stricken dead. As the stars of heaven. Gen. 22:17 Many in number; a great multitude. Went in at the gate. Gen. 23:18 Mature men who sat at the counsel. Hand under thigh. Gen. 24:2 Hand under girdle; a solemn oath. Tender eyed. Gen. 29:17 Attractive eyes. He hath sold us. Gen. 31:15 He has devoured our dowry. Wrestling with an angel. Gen. 32:24 Being suspicious of a pious man. Coat of many colors. Gen. 37:23 A coat with long sleeves meaning learning, honor and a high position. Spilling seed on the ground. Gen. 38:9 Spilling semen on the ground. (An ancient practice of birth control.) No man shall lift up his hand or foot. Gen. 41:44 No man shall do anything without your approval. Put his hand upon thine eyes. Gen. 46:4 Shall close your eyes upon your death bed. Laying on of hands. Gen. 48:14 Blessing and approving a person. His right hand upon the head. Gen. 48:17 A sincere blessing. Unstable as water. Gen. 49:4 Undecided; in a dilemma. The sceptre shall not depart from Judah. Gen. 49:10 There shall always be a king from the lineage of Judah. Washed his garments in wine. Gen. 49:11 He will become an owner of many vineyards. His teeth white with milk. Gen. 49:12 He will have abundant flocks of sheep. His bow abode in strength. Gen. 49:24 He will become a valiant warrior. The stone of Israel. Gen. 49:24 The strong race of Israel. He gathered up his feet. Gen. 49:33 He stretched out his feet—He breathed his last breathe; he died.
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George M. Lamsa (Idioms in the Bible Explained and a Key to the Original Gospels)
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Have you noticed the persistent pattern of outrage that manifests from the black community whenever a black life is taken by a white person, especially a white cop?
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Taleeb Starkes (Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry)
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the developing world, compared to what appears to be the case among Europeans, condemnation of what America does claims much greater attention than condemnation of what America’s is—and for good reason. In parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, there are millions of people whose grievances against the United States could easily be classified as vehemently anti-American, but they are born out of real-life experiences where the United States has often behaved brutally, murderously, and to the clear detriment of these regions and its inhabitants. To
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Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
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the developing world, compared to what appears to be the case among Europeans, condemnation of what America does claims much greater attention than condemnation of what America’s is—and for good reason. In parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, there are millions of people whose grievances against the United States could easily be classified as vehemently anti-American, but they are born out of real-life experiences where the United States has often behaved brutally, murderously, and to the clear detriment of these regions and its inhabitants. To put the point crudely: I find that anti-Americanism among Vietnamese, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans—to name just a few exam ples—has a completely different historical and political status from its equivalent among Germans, the French, or the British. America has often wronged peoples of color, and its policies have frequently harmed countries in the developing world. None of this applies to Europeans—quite the contrary.
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Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
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A morbid concentration on one’s grievances with life will only make one’s problems more severe. Far better to focus on one’s successes, to gain confidence from seeing oneself winning out. Then one can forge ahead in life.
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Og Mandino (University of Success: From the bestselling author of The Greatest Salesman in the World)
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In the charged atmosphere of these months it was easy for exiles to gild insignificant grievances.
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Catherine Fletcher (The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici)
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George Bernard Shaw wrote, “This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
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Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?)
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Expressive association
In the United States, expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment – speech, assembly, press, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group's expression. However, in the subsequent decisions of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group's ability to advocate a particular point of view. The government cannot, through the use of anti-discrimination laws, force groups to include a message that they do not wish to convey.
However, this concept does not now apply in the University setting due to the Supreme Court's ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld Hastings College of Law policy that the school's conditions on recognizing student groups were viewpoint neutral and reasonable. The policy requires student organizations to allow "any student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions, regardless of their status or beliefs" and so, can be used to deny the group recognition as an official student organization because it had required its members to attest in writing that "I believe in: The Bible as the inspired word of God; The Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God's son; The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins; His bodily resurrection and His personal return; The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration; [and] Jesus Christ, God's son, is Lord of my life." The Court reasoned that because this constitutional inquiry occurs in the education context the same considerations that have led the Court to apply a less restrictive level of scrutiny to speech in limited public forums applies. Thus, the college's all-comers policy is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student organization forum.
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Wikipedia: Freedom of Association
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This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
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Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?)
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This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me; it is sort of a splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
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Robert K. Greenleaf (Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness)
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Specifically, animal forms in Er’s vision serve to transmute passions into virtues. Ajax, nursing his grievance over the arms of Achilles, chooses the life of a lion, spurning the human form (620b). Plato obviously comments here upon the fit of insane rage in which, in Sophocles’ tragedy, Ajax slaughters sheep and cattle, thinking them the Greek leaders who have disgraced him. A hero become ignoble in the throes of passion becomes here a creature who kills dispassionately to survive. Ajax can more easily manifest virtue as a lion than as a human who would begin from the place where the son of Telamon ended; he can be a just lion who could no longer be a just human.
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Edward P. Butler (Essays on Plato)
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It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether there is someone in your life you have not completely forgiven, an "enemy." If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be aware of the thoughts that keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to those thoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place. The seeing is freeing.
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
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In the first garden, the first Adam, me, had said, Not your will, but mine, and eaten of the knowledge of good and evil, which was judgment and grievance. In the second garden, the second Adam, Yeshua, had said, Not my will, but yours, and surrendered his life.
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Ted Dekker (A.D. 33 (A.D., #2))
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Grammie, did God really speak to you?” “Charlie, I wouldn’t say He spoke in words, but He does speak to my heart. It took me many years to learn to listen, but when I did, it changed my life. God doesn’t mind hearing our grievances against Him, our complaints about life, or even how angry we are when things don’t go our way. He’s big enough to handle our disappointments. It’s when we get through with our railings that we need to stop and listen. Often God’s voice is still and silent. Sometimes it’s as bold as lightning and as loud as thunder. But if we don’t give Him time to speak, we’ll never know what He has to say.
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Heidi Gray McGill (Desire of my Heart (Shumard Oak Bend #1))
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Perhaps she was just old-fashioned, Agnes said, but it seemed to her that severe introspection was a sure way to get lost in the smallest issues, to reduce one's life to a list of grievances. For her daughter, it felt like every conversation, every memory could lead to an injustice that needs talking through.
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Aysegül Savas (White on White)
“
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.
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Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)
“
But for the overwhelming number of people I talked with, being asked to smile and be nice to people didn’t come close to tops in terms of a grievance.
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Benjamin Lorr (The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket)
“
What grievance have you with Inys, wyrm?” Her voice came high and brittle. “Who are you?”
She spoke in Inysh. Recognition sparked in its eyes.
“Who comes after the one who came before,” came its answer. “I breathed flame into life, and made death flesh. I am the fire beneath, unleashed.” Its Hróthi was rumbling and harsh. “I am Fyredel.
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Samantha Shannon
“
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future,” Tolle says. “Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness… are caused by too much past.
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Terri Trespicio (Unfollow Your Passion: How to Create a Life that Matters to You)
“
Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.
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Dale Carnegie (How To Stop Worrying And Start Living)
“
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos’, which seemed to Churchill to embody his idea extremely well: ‘Spare the conquered and wear down the proud.’ And Churchill went on to say that this had been his principle throughout: ‘I thought we ought to have conquered the Irish and then given them Home Rule; that we ought to have starved out the Germans, and then revictualled their country; and that after smashing the General Strike, we should have met the grievances of the miners. I always get into trouble because so few people take this line. I was once asked to devise an inscription for a monument in France. I wrote, “In war, Resolution. In defeat, Defiance. In victory, Magnanimity. In peace, Goodwill.”’ Whether or not that
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft (Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill)
“
ALTHOUGH writers and publishers like to grumble about the proliferation of libel lawsuits in this country, few would seriously propose that anything be done to reverse the trend. The Ayatollah’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie brings into relief the primitive feeling that lies behind every libel suit, and makes the writer only too grateful for the mechanism the law provides for transforming the displeased subject’s impulse to kill him into the move civilized aim of extracting large sums of money from him. Although the money is rarely collected—most libel suits end in defeat for the plaintiff or in a modest settlement—the lawsuit itself functions as a powerful therapeutic agent, ridding the subject of his feelings of humiliating powerlessness and restoring to him his cheer and amour propre. From the lawyer who takes him into his care he immediately receives the relief that a sympathetic hearing of one’s grievances affords. Conventional psychotherapy would soon veer off into an unpleasurable examination of the holes in one’s story, but the law cure never ceases to be gratifying; in fact, what the lawyer says and writes on his client’s behalf is gratifying beyond the latter’s wildest expectations. The rhetoric of advocacy law is the rhetoric of the late-night vengeful brooding which in life rarely survives the skeptical light of morning but in a lawsuit becomes inscribed, as if in stone, in the bellicose documents that accrue while the lawsuit takes its course, and proclaims with every sentence “I am right! I am right! I am right!” On the other side, meanwhile, the same orgy of self-justification is taking place. The libel defendant, after an initial anxious moment (we all feel guilty of something, and being sued stirs the feeling up), comes to see, through the ministrations of his lawyer-therapist, that he is completely in the right and has nothing to fear. Of pleasurable reading experiences there may be none greater than that afforded by a legal document written on one’s behalf. A lawyer will argue for you as you could never argue for yourself, and, with his lawyer’s rhetoric, give you a feeling of certitude that you could never obtain for yourself from the language of everyday discourse. People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other.
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Janet Malcolm (The Journalist and the Murderer)
“
One of the most comprehensive biblical discussions of anger is found in Ephesians 4. The Apostle Paul suggests ways to put off the old style of life and put on the new (vv.22-24). We are to put away falsehoods and speak only truth (v.25), to put away stealing and work honestly (v.28), to avoid unwholesome talk, while speaking only things that build others up (v.29). He tells us to develop new ways of handling our anger: “In your anger do not sin,” that is, don’t become aggressive (v.26a). “Never let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold;” that is, don’t be passive (vv.26b, 27). After dealing with other ways to put off the old way of life, Paul returns to the topic of how to effectively handle anger and frustrations effectively: “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (vv.31, 32). These words describe the entire range of passive-aggressive responses that occur when we suppress or repress anger: thumos (the outburst of anger that occurs when too many resentments have built up), orge (chronic anger and ill-temper), krauge (brawling or anger that makes sure everyone hears the grievance), pikria (bitterness, the emotional state that comes when we nurse grudges), blas-phemia (slanderous, abusive speech toward an irritating party), pasa kakis (Paul’s catch-all term for any malicious feeling not already mentioned). We are to learn how to handle frustrations without being passive, aggressive or passive-aggressive.
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Henry Virkler (Speaking the Truth in Love)
“
My experience at the Division of AIDS really opened my eyes about how the system really operated. The federal budget is a big trough to feed special interest groups. But if you become wise to it, open your mouth, and get on the wrong side of someone really powerful, they are out for blood. The government lawyers up, and they have unlimited resources to burn you. Truth may not be on their side, but they can throw every obstacle in your way to getting a fair hearing of your grievance. And you can’t get justice because litigation will drain you to your last penny. The system isn’t designed to help the aggrieved party. I couldn’t coerce Fauci for a deposition. He was too busy doing interviews and accepting awards. There were never any consequences for the perpetrators. They continued merrily in their careers. I had to start all over again. If they are determined to ruin your life, they can do it.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
In their music the Minutemen told stories, postulated theories, held debates, aired grievances, and celebrated victories—and did it in a direct, intimate way that flattered the intelligence as well as the soul.
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Michael Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991)
“
And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices resentment, and thereby renounces something that had been dear to his heart.”5 All true, and all urgently needed today in a nation of pent-up frustrations and grievances. Mercy is a central lesson of the Gospel. So is forgiveness. But then what happens to justice? The difficult fact about pursuing justice is this: it’s vital to a humane and well-ordered society; it’s the cornerstone of all credible law; and yet it can rarely be fully achieved. The tangle of humans’ interlocking wounds, fears, poisoned memories, and debts is too old and too vast for anyone to unravel. But enough justice—even if imperfect—can be had when it’s leavened with a measure of mercy, the free act of forgiving, and the letting go of some debts that we know others owe to us. Letting go allows others to do the same. It heals and gives peace. It breaks up and washes away the toxic ice of resentment that chokes the heart. And in doing so, it takes on a Godly irony that gives life.
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Charles J. Chaput (Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living)
“
fearful of the idea of a regular meeting at which all could air their grievances. I stood silently at the back, waiting for the fuse to be lit.
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Don Felder (Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001))
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The Bee-Attitudes Be led by the Holy Spirit. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (emancipation from bondage, freedom). 2 Corinthians 3:17 Be free in Christ. And I will walk at liberty and at ease, for I have sought and inquired for (and desperately required) Your precepts. Psalm 119:45 Be uncomplicated. I am the Door; anyone who enters in through Me will be saved (will live). He will come in and he will go out (freely), and will find pasture. John 10:9 Be confident in God. Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. Proverbs 3:5 Be quick to forgive. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Colossians 3:13 Be honest. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices. Colossians 3:9; There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to Him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to tun to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers. My son, keep your father’s commandment, and forsake not your mother’s teaching. Proverbs 6:16-20 ESV Be outrageously blessed. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will give you the desires and secret petitions of your heart. Psalm 37:4 Through it all, may this book inspire you to live more joyfully, enjoy life and thrive by living a grateful life.
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Aurora A. Ambrose (Green Pastures, Still Waters: Overcoming in The Eye of the Storm (Live Sunny Side Up Book 3))
“
We spend countless hours nursing grievances instead of forgiving, thinking about what we want instead of being thankful for what we have, and feeling haunted by the past instead of being excited about the future.
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Rodney Gage (ReThink Life: How to Be Different from the Norm)
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After dinner, Michael vouchsafed to me that he had had an encounter with Barbara Castle at a recent Tribune event: [MF] You told me about what she had done ... in your case. [Castle had asked for a fee as the price of an interview and I had refused.] [CR] I was really surprised. [MF] She spoke to me about that the other day. I don’t want to cause any trouble. I don’t want her to think that I’ve got any grievance against her because it won’t serve any purpose. You know, we’re longstanding friends and I’m now on very good terms with her ... She’d been in on the foundation of Tribune ... We’ve had our quarrels ... It was quite shocking—Barbara’s reply to you. She shouldn’t have done anything like that, but ... she’s losing her eyesight. I may wake up any day to see that she is dead. I had quite a talk with her ... She was feeling very guilty about what she said to you, and she came out with it in some way or other, and I said, “No, no Barbara. You don’t have to worry about this.” I wouldn’t ask to see her again. Very handsome? chivalric of my biographical subject, but not so helpful to me, I thought.
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Carl Rollyson (A Private Life of Michael Foot)
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A few fascist movements became much more successful than the general run of fascist streetcorner orators and bullies. By becoming the carriers of substantial grievances and interests, and by becoming capable of rewarding political ambitions, they took root within political systems. A handful of them played major roles in public life. These successful fascisms elbowed a space among the other contending parties or interest groups, and persuaded influential people that they could represent their interests and feelings and fulfill their ambitions better than any conventional party. The early ragtag outsiders thus transformed themselves into serious political forces capable of competing on equal terms with longer-established parties or movements. Their success influenced entire political systems, giving them a more intense and aggressive tone and legitimating open expressions of extreme nationalism, Left-baiting, and racism. This bundle of processes—how fascist parties take root—is the subject of the present chapter.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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To Her Steady Lover - Poem by Jibanananda Das
There is no meaning in living—I don't say this.
There is meaning for some, may be for all—may be a perfect meaning.
Yet I hear the white sound of wind-driven birds
In the water of the distant seas
beneath the burning summer sun.
The candle burns slowly, very slowly, on my table;
The books of intellect are more still—unwavering— lost in meditation;
Yet when you go out on to the streets
or even while sitting by the window side
Will you sense the frenzied dance of violent waters;
Right beside that a book of your cheeks; no more like a lantern,
Perhaps like a conch-shell lying on the beach as if ocean's father
It is also a music by his own merit—like Nature:
caustic—lovable—finally like the most favourite entity.
So I get the taste of expansive wind in the airing
of maddening grievances;
Otherwise in the mind's forest the python coils up around the doe:
I feel the pitiable hint of a life like that in the Sceptre of protest.
Some glacier-cold still flock of Cormorants will realize my words;
When the electric-compass of life will cease
They will eat up snow-grey sleep like polar seas in endless grasp.
”
”
Jibanananda Das (Selected Poems (English and Bengali Edition))
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George Bernard Shaw: “The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”27
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Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
“
Complaining may offer relief, but so does acceptance. There is no perfect place. There is no perfect life. There will always be something to moan about. By focusing on grievances, I risk missing out on precious, startling moments of appreciation.
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Anonymous
“
She had seen behind the obvious truth--that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition--to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn't blame his dissatisfaction on someone else?
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
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Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people. What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
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As freedoms slip away and suffering draws near, we must not be known as an exasperated people always ready to give an answer for our protest and grievance
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Elliot Clark (Evangelism as Exiles: Life on Mission As Strangers In Our Own Land)
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Petty grievances in marriage are like hothouse tomatoes: they get way bigger than they ought to, and they bear little resemblance to the real thing.
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Anna Quindlen (Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life)
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As we age, we tend to improve our gratitude skills. Through trial and error learning, we know that if we focus on the good and positive, we see ourselves as lucky. Whereas, when we focus on grievances, past pains, regrets, and disappointments, we can make ourselves feel unlucky and miserable. Also, we are likely to have experienced sad events that propelled us toward gratitude as a means of psychic survival.
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Mary Pipher (Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age)
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These experts sought to promote the idea, which culminated after 9/11 in the War on Terror, that the West was up against enemies of such unfathomable evil that engaging with their causes or motivations was pointless, and that virtually anything the national security state did to combat them, including a dramatic rise in civilian deaths, was justified. To the millions of people whom it impacted - Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Africans of secular background or various faiths - the terrorism paradigm created a painful double existence. Those who believed that, in many instances, violence committed in their countries of origin stemmed from legitimate grievances - that the violence was not legitimate, but the underlying pathologies and grievances were - felt themselves unable to acknowledge this in public life.
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Azadeh Moaveni (Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS)
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He’d had a lot of people in his cab over the years and had become quite adept at spotting the “good souls” as he like to call them. With every good soul, it wasn’t necessarily about the way they looked, although their eyes were always bright, it was more to do with the way they made you feel. Comfortable, confident and genuinely happier for having been in their company. It wasn’t about conversation either; it was about connection which went beyond words. Good souls were not always seen to be good people, but whatever their beliefs, grievances or prejudice they would turn in a heartbeat for anyone in need and although they didn’t know it, they subconsciously projected it. At the very heart of every good soul, there was only love and decency, guiding principles that would see them safely back to shore in the rockiest of storms. There was no question in the driver’s mind that the fella in the back of his cab was one of life’s good souls and the world was a better place because he was in it.
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Bianca O'Connor (Rocket Fuel)
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grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
“
The three cycles of loss center on our sense of control, safety, and identity.
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Laurie Nadel
“
I was almost sixty years old by then, and comfortable-even happy- with the idea that my days of love and adventure were over. When I looked back on my life, it was with clear eyes, Yes, I had suffered. But I was wise enough by then to understand that my suffering was never a punishment, that it was just the way things turned out for me. But I hadn't just suffered. I loved, too. And I was loved. And it was a great love, one of those loves that not even most of us get to experience. When I lay my head on the pillow at night, it was truly without regret or grievance in my heart.
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Joanna Bell (Magnus (Mists of Albion #4))
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Social media is a system of ideas that claims to be able to address everything, including every grievance. And it does so while encouraging people to focus almost limitlessly upon themselves – something which users of social media do not always need to be encouraged to do. Better still, if you feel at any point anything less than 100 per cent satisfied with your life and circumstances, here is a totalistic system to explain everything, with a whole repository full of elucidations as to what in the world has kept you back.
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Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
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God created you and me to be relational beings, but I know how easy it is to get trapped in my own comfort zone, becoming lazy about building healthy new relationships or maintaining existing ones. Playwright George Bernard Shaw believed that “the true joy of life” was “being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
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L.C. Fowler (Dare To Live Greatly)
“
This is the true joy in life . . . being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one . . . being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. ... I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
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Stephen R. Covey (First Things First)
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This is the true joy in life—that being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. That being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
”
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Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
“
If this is for real,
Please don't!!!
We are all struggling one way or the other, a lot of pains on told, a lot of tears retained, a lot of actions revoked, a lot of plans annulled, if am to continue, I definitely have enough words to continue, but non can qualify my thoughts, non can transcribe my very mind, so, in short, don't give up, it's just some few more steps, don't be swallowed up
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Daniel I. OWOEYE
“
She knows now, as she did not once, what matters and what really doesn’t. At fifty-eight years old, Eleanor has reached a stage in her life when it no longer makes sense to revisit all the old grievances or to hold on to bitterness that hurt nobody as much as one’s self. She has forgiven Cam for all the ways he disappointed and hurt her. She has had to forgive herself, too, for her own vast catalog of shortcomings and failures, poor choices, damage incurred to those she loved and to herself. She knows now what she did not before, that every family’s history is made up of many stories—all probably possessing some element of truth, but none of them, individually, containing all of it.
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Joyce Maynard (How the Light Gets In)
“
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. —George Bernard Shaw
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Michael J. Fox (Lucky Man: A Memoir)
“
A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of “what someone did to me” or “what someone did to us.
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
“
The true joy of life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap heap … being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.
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Robert W. Fuller (The Rowan Tree)
“
Is it possible for us, for nearly half a century, to observe only one side of the person who shares our life? Can it be that, out of habit, we pick and choose among the things they say and the things they do, retaining only that which nurtures our grievances and perpetuates our resentment? Have we a fatal tendency to simplify other people—to eliminate all those features which might be regarded as extenuating, which might render more human the caricature of them which our hatred needs for its justification?
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François Mauriac
“
It gave him a kind of nervous satisfaction to see his basic grievance against reality confirmed once again by reality itself; nothing hold still. Every time you turned out around, something else had gone rotten, or fallen into despair, or disappeared entirely. In a universe that couldn't be trusted, that could at any moment just as likely as not blow up in your face like a bomb, you had to carve out your own island of order and control, however arbitrary, however illusory, just to keep going.
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Glenn Savan (White Palace)
“
The doctor had begun by bullying her, had said Mrs. Callendar was nice, and then—finding the ground safe—had changed; he had alternately whined over his grievances and patronized her, had run a dozen ways in a single sentence, had been unreliable, inquisitive, vain. Yes, it was all true, but how false as a summary of the man; the essential life of him had been slain.
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E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
“
Everything seems too happy for me all at once. I thought it would always be part of my life to long for home, and losing that grievance makes me feel rather empty: I suppose it served instead of sense to fill up my mind?
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George Eliot (Middlemarch)
“
While this was happening, an isolated snowflake fell from the sky. It danced above all walks of life before making a rapid and orderly descent towards the earth, The snowflake received orders from higher up, assignments that became more specific with each passing moment. Starting with a continent and ending with a specific square inch of Earth's surface, it eventually traveled through an eccentric gathering of individuals. Their purpose was not clear, their grievances unknown. The confused snowflake entered into its final phase of divine obligation before contacting the ground and being relinquished of all responsibilities forever.
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Michael Ryan Anderson (Shot In The Foot: A Collection Of Eccentric Short Stories)
“
The problem with state authority from below – and this is proving to be the key vulnerability of liberal democracies today – is that they must be rooted in some kind of consensus. Without a consensus about the nature of justice or a shared understanding of the common good, it is almost impossible to create social cohesion and political concord. Without some kind of shared social vision, what is considered ‘good’ becomes ephemeral, driven by fashion and theatrics, torn asunder by disparate groups, each with their own agenda. Without a shared story, we cease caring about the common good and allow our minds to be dulled by endless entertainment, we cease to have the ability to discern truth from lies, or we demand that all opposition is destroyed even if this overthrows our own freedoms. Without shared symbols, stories, ideals, goals and visions of human life together, a liberal democracy can fracture and fragment its freedoms away. Without belief in one who sits above the table of petty partisan squabbles, we are destined to be governed by grifters and torn apart by grievances.
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N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies)
“
The ludicrous happens every day. The unthinkable is made real not through rational thought, but feelings. We’ll follow a charismatic leader if they tell us that we have a legitimate grievance. That they’ll give us back our dignity. Our threatened way of life. If we follow them, our enemies will be vanquished and we will be heroes. Who doesn’t want to be part of something bigger than ourselves? Who doesn’t want to be a hero? Even if it’s all fabricated.
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Louise Penny (The Black Wolf (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #20))
“
One of the things I come up against often in my practice is the notion of forgiveness. Do you want to repeat the mistakes your parents made? Holding on to your grievances for the rest of your life? Or do you want to put that burden down?
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Jojo Moyes (We All Live Here)
“
No,” said Dorian Gray, “there is nothing fearful about it. It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment—about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six—you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered—I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from the proper artistic point of view. Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts? I remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp—there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me.“No,” said Dorian Gray, “there is nothing fearful about it. It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment—about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six—you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered—I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“
No,” said Dorian Gray, “there is nothing fearful about it. It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment—about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six—you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered—I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from the proper artistic point of view. Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts? I remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp—there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)