“
You can’t save anyone who wouldn’t save themselves without you. It’s the
hardest lesson to learn in life, take it from me.
”
”
Marc Jampole
“
You can’t save anyone who wouldn’t save themselves without you. It’s the hardest lesson to learn in life, take it from me.
- p. 47, The Brothers Silver
”
”
Marc Jampole (The Brothers Silver)
“
The night was when all the failures were remembered longer.
”
”
Sergio Cobo (A Story of Yesterday)
“
--perhaps monsters were misunderstood gods; deities with plans too grand for humans; a phantom of evil that drank from the roots of good.
”
”
Roshani Chokshi (The Silvered Serpents (The Gilded Wolves, #2))
“
Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
“
... the vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 2)
“
the philosophical cure
to anxiety
is not optimism
but rather pessimism.
optimism says
“the world is beautiful
and there’s no reason to be sad.”
pessimism says
“look at all these countries
waging wars
let’s go get some ice cream
and just listen to some sad records.
”
”
Juansen Dizon (I Am The Architect of My Own Destruction)
“
Pets reflect you like mirrors. When you are happy, you can see your dog smiling and when you are sad, your cat cries.
”
”
Munia Khan
“
... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (A Compendium of Essays: Purcell, Hogarth and Handel, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy, and Andrew Lloyd Webber)
“
Worry not
if you are in darkness
and the void sucks you in further.
This is not the place we go to die.
It’s where we are born
and our stories begin.
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.
”
”
Michel de Montaigne
“
... the lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World)
“
The best kind of love is the one that results in the profoundest level of melancholy. Longing for someone whom you have never been with or desiring someone, who, for some reason, can’t ever be yours, are the kinds of pain that must be embraced and endured. It’s a privilege to feel sad because of love. For it means the love has served its purpose. As it evoked the emotions in us that we were never ready for.
”
”
Abhaidev (That Thing About You)
“
Isn't it strange how people are selective about the truth the want to see or hear?
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
“
When you are feeling upset, angry, or sad,” Epictetus said, “don’t blame another for your state of mind. Your condition is the result of your own opinions and interpretations. . . .
”
”
Epictetus (The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life)
“
What do you think all of us are here for? Certainly not to seek happiness. We are not here to enjoy. We are here to feel. Experiencing emotions is what human minds are made for. Emotions of every kind. A full gamut. A life spent on experiencing sentiments that lie at only one side of the spectrum is no life at all. We shouldn’t avoid grief. Instead, we should welcome despair in our lives with open arms. For it makes us who we are. It makes us complete.
”
”
Abhaidev (That Thing About You)
“
Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures.
”
”
Milan Kundera (Slowness)
“
Many a parent, sad to say, has used their child as an opportunity for them, the parent, to do, through their child, something or some of the things that they, the parent, did not do or did not do successfully.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana (The Use and Misuse of Children)
“
I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Was it Mom and Dad's fault?( Was it just temporal, a 'bad time' in my life? (When the divorce ends will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful alienting urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
In the poem, Rumi banters with God over life's usual philosophical questions: what to do with that pesky thing called a heart, where to focus one's eyes, etcetera, etcetera. But when Rumi asks God what to do with his pain and sorrow, God tells him, "Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
”
”
Farah Naz Rishi (I Hope You Get This Message)
“
Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.
”
”
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
“
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.
I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.
Thus Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind, was really a sharper and more stinging judge, to my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin, shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he considered us incapable of doing either good or evil....
Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.
”
”
Michel de Montaigne (The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters)
“
The individual," he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, "is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes besides himself." He
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Crome Yellow)
“
I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.
”
”
Anatole Broyard (Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir)
“
Enough of thought, philosopher!
Too long hast thou been dreaming
Unlightened, in this chamber drear,
While summer’s sun is beaming!
Space-sweeping soul, what sad refrain
Concludes thy musings once again?
”
”
Emily Brontë (Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell)
“
When I was weak, I was full of fear.
When I was strong, I was full of hope.
When I was a happy, I was full of peace.
When I was a sad, I was full of suffering.
When I was poor, I was full of gratitude.
When I was rich, I was full of longing.
When I was wise, I was full of grace.
When I was foolish, I was full of ignorance.
When I was a child, I was full of joy.
When I was a youth, I was full of laughter.
When I was an adult, I was full of trouble.
When I was an elder, I was full of wisdom.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. ... If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to… what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place. I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realise with stupor how much I was gypped.
”
”
Simone de Beauvoir (Force of Circumstance)
“
Live joyfully this life. Once gone, who knows if we ever get it back. Atheists think we do not. Mystics say you will. Either way, chill.
”
”
Fakeer Ishavardas
“
They that weep in the rain shade no tears.
”
”
Kayambila Mpulamasaka
“
Some people were destined to have a significant other.
Some people were destined for greatness.
But few others were destined to be soldiers, to be warriors, to be alone.
That is me.
It is not a path that i have chosen, but it is a path that i must walk.
Some may think this is sad, but i have come to peace with it.
Because i am and always will be
a soldier, a warrior...Alone.
”
”
Chris Söderström
“
Self-destruction is the most interesting thing we mortals do. We break ourselves one way so we don’t die from another. We cover pain with pain and then we escape in the normalcy of our suffering.
”
”
Iris Lake (Meet Me in the Ether)
“
In Lincoln’s middle years, a loud insistence on his own woe evolved into a quiet, disciplined yearning. He yoked his feelings to a style of severe self-control, articulating a melancholy that was, more than anything, philosophical. He saw the world as a sad, difficult place from which he expected considerable suffering.
”
”
Joshua Wolf Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness)
“
You were born happy,
don’t die sad.
You were born full,
don’t die empty.
You were born rich,
don’t die poor.
You were born pure,
don’t die corrupt.
You were born innocent,
don’t die guilty.
You were born free,
don’t die shackled.
You were born curious,
don’t die indifferent.
You were born sensitive,
don’t die heartless.
You were born tolerant,
don’t die prejudiced.
You were born trusting,
don’t die cynical.
You were born caring,
don’t die spiteful.
You were born loving,
don’t die hateful.
You were born youthful,
don’t die worn-out.
You were born active,
don’t die idle.
You were born lively,
don’t die downcast.
You were born special,
don’t die normal.
You were born extraordinary,
don’t die common.
You were born you,
don’t die someone else.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not blue the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and the softcymballing, round the harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
”
”
Herman Melville
“
When you are feeling upset, angry, or sad,” Epictetus said, “don’t blame another for your state of mind. Your condition is the result of your own opinions and interpretations. . . . “When anyone provokes you, remember that it is actually your own opinion provoking you. It is not the person who insults or attacks you who torments your mind, but the view you take of these things.
”
”
Epictetus (The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life)
“
O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being!
”
”
Robert Farrar Capon (The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Food))
“
Is attention soul? If I pay attention to my mother’s sorrow, does that give it soul? If I pay attention to her unhappiness—if I put it into words, transform it, and make it into something new—can I be like the alchemists, turning lead into gold? If I sell this book, I will get back gold in return. That’s a kind of alchemy. The philosophers wanted to turn dark matter into gold, and I want to turn my mother’s sadness into gold. When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep, and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold.
”
”
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
“
My Favorite rapper Tupac Shakur.. Philosophical... The emotional depth of his lyricism. Rest in peace. So sad when I listen your music. I understand the struggle, I know exactly how you feel... Been there a million times. Wanting to change the world and Everytime you speak up, only your echo answers you back
”
”
Crystal Evans
“
To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents.
”
”
Martin Jay (The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School & the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50)
“
The psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm claimed that humankind’s most basic fear is the threat of being separated from other humans. He believed that the experience of separateness, first encountered in infancy, is the source of all anxiety in human life. John Bowlby agreed, citing a good deal of experimental evidence and research to support the idea that separation from one’s caregivers – usually the mother or father – during the latter part of the first year of life inevitably creates fear and sadness in babies. He feels that separation and interpersonal loss are at the very roots of the human experiences of fear, sadness, and sorrow.
”
”
Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living)
“
I am a shadow. I walk the wet roads under the dim light of the pale lamps, in the darkest hour of the cold dull nights.
I walk past the silent graveyard of the dead memories, towards the city of chaos plagued with gloom.
I do not exist, but in the eyes of the shattered souls. In the chapter of an old book. In the poem. In the smile of a wrecked and in the tear of a broken spirit.
Listen me in the songs told in the times long forgotten.
Search for me in the churchs and temples, bars and brothels,pitch black nights and the colorless days.
Dive down in your deepest part of your soul. And you will find my home.
I have many faces but I have no face of my own. I am a shadow.
”
”
Foaad Ahmad
“
Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, “Either I am much deceived,
or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: “ ’Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with a
double L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.
”
”
Michel de Montaigne (The Complete Essays)
“
What a sad generation. In the olden days. We used to learn from our mistakes. These days you get canceled for your mistakes.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
When you are feeling upset, angry, or sad, don’t blame another for your state of mind.
”
”
Epictetus (The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life)
“
When you are feeling upset, angry, or sad, don’t blame another for your state of mind. Your condition is the result of your own opinions and interpretations.
”
”
Epictetus (The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life)
“
He hears merry tales and smiles not. I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth.
”
”
William Shakespeare (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare)
“
Let the Christian world forget or depart from this true gospel salvation; let anything else be trusted but the cross of Christ and the Spirit of Christ; and then, though churches and preachers and prayers and sacraments are everywhere in plenty, nothing can come of them but a Christian kingdom of pagan vices, along with a mouth-professed belief in the Apostles’ Creed and the communion of saints. To this sad truth all Christendom both at home and abroad bears full witness. Who need be told that no corruption or depravity of human nature, no kind of pride, wrath, envy, malice, and self-love; no sort of hypocrisy, falseness, cursing, gossip, perjury, and cheating; no wantonness of lust in every kind of debauchery, foolish jesting, and worldly entertainment, is any less common all over Christendom, both popish and Protestant, than towns and villages. What vanity, then, to count progress in terms of numbers of new and lofty cathedrals, chapels, sanctuaries, mission stations, and multiplied new membership lists, when there is no change in this undeniable departure of men’s hearts from the living God. Yea, let the whole world be converted to Christianity of this kind, and let every citizen be a member of some Protestant or Catholic church and mouth the creed every Lord’s day; and no more would have been accomplished toward bringing the kingdom of God among men than if they had all joined this or that philosophical society or social fraternity.
”
”
William Law (The Power of the Spirit)
“
I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, wich of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this dispair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?) Was it just temporal, a "bad time" in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcholisme.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that come after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it Karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
Sad thing about most people who are ruining the country to be in a bad state. Can afford to runaway and live in another country when things goes wrong or bad in the country they are ruining.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
A philosopher once assured me he had persuaded his cat to become a vegan. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan titbits? Had he introduced his cat to other cats, already practising vegans, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and persuaded it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor was not amused. I realized he actually believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was feeding itself by visiting other homes and hunting. If it brought any carcasses home – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly all too prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.
”
”
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
“
Robbers
*
sometimes your words rob you of your thoughts
and leave you destitute
and sad
will they weep for you i wonder
_____________________________
rassool jibraeel snyman (c) 2015
"The Poetic Assassin
”
”
rassool jibraeel snyman
“
From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Albert Ellis, who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, a precursor to cognitive behavior therapy, taught me the extent to which we teach ourselves negative feelings about ourselves—and the negative and self-defeating behaviors that follow from these feelings. He showed that underlying our least effective and most harmful behaviors is a philosophical or ideological core that is irrational but is so central to our views of our self and the world that often we aren’t aware that it is only a belief, nor are we aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.
”
”
Edith Eger (The Choice)
“
The universe appeals to your sense, not your senselessness;
your understanding, not your shallowness;
your discernment, not your blindness;
your intellect, not your nonsense;
your rationale, not your recklessness;
your knowledge, not your ignorance;
your wisdom, not your imprudence;
your insight, not your brainlessness;
and your enlightenment, not your foolishness.
The universe also appeals to your enjoyment, not your sadness;
your courage, not your fearfulness;
your hope, not your bitterness;
your humility, not your arrogance;
your honesty, not your deceitfulness;
your mercy, not your ruthlessness;
your charity, not your stinginess;
your strength, not your weakness;
and your love, not your hatefulness.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
Like the Japanese, the Stoics know “all things everywhere are perishable.” They see this fact as cause for neither sadness, like many of us, nor celebration, like the Japanese, but merely a fact of life. Rationally there is nothing we can do about it, so best not to worry. Marcus reminds us that all we cherish will one day disappear like leaves on a tree so we must “beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.
”
”
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
“
Thus the esthetically sensitive man stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher does to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for these pictures afford him an interpretation of life, and it is by these processes that he trains himself for life. And it is not only the agreeable and friendly picture that he experiences in himself with such perfect understanding: but the serious, the troubled, the sad, the gloomy, the sudden restraints, the tricks of fate, the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole DIVINE COMEDY of life, and the inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows in the wall - for in these scenes he lives and suffers - and yet without that fleeting sensation of appearance.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)
“
The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.
In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?
But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.
That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide.
The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated.
The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives.
Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five.
When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
When perplexed,
light appears to you in the form of truth;
when troubled,
in the form of reason;
when sad,
in the form of understanding;
and when heartbroken,
in the form of love.
When perplexed,
love appears to you in the form of friendships;
when troubled,
in the form of family;
when sad,
in the form of lovers;
and when heartbroken,
in the form of God.
When perplexed,
God appears to you in the form of wisdom;
when troubled,
in the form of patience;
when sad,
in the form of joy;
and when heartbroken,
in the form of peace.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.
”
”
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
“
Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you. Given who I am and what I do, I can’t know what that’s like, but I think it would be a little scary and disorienting—like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs. Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
“
Sad generation is confused. Why they have to do wrong things, unnatural things. They have to be ill-mannered, uncultured, disrespectful, arrogant and have no morals and justified it by saying. They are practicing their freedom and rights. They are brave, bold, strong, confident , and have self esteem.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
The Nigger was a handsome, austere woman with snow-white hair and a dark and awful dignity. Her brown eyes, brooding deep in her skull, looked out on an ugly world with philosophic sorrow. She conducted her house like a cathedral dedicated to a sad but erect Priapus. If you wanted a good laugh
and a poke in the ribs, you went to Jenny’s and got your money’s worth; but if the sweet worldsadness close to tears crept out of your immutable loneliness, the Long Green was your place. When you came out of there you felt that something pretty stern and important had happened. It was no jump in the hay. The dark beautiful eyes of the Nigger stayed with you for days.
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
Music is not what I think it is, Schopenhauer tells me. It does not convey emotion. It conveys the essence, the container, of emotions without the content. When we listen to music, we perceive not a particular sadness or a particular joy but sadness itself and joy itself—“the extracted quintessence of these feelings,” says Schopenhauer
”
”
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
“
Because that’s not what the B-man is, either. You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philosopher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It’s the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy. . . .
”
”
Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness)
“
The sad consequence of all this is that we no longer know what to do with the real world. We can no longer see any need whatever for this residue which has become an encumbrance. A crucial philosophical problem, that of the real which has been `laid off'. And we have the same problem with unemployment: what is to be done with labour in the computer age? What are we to make of this exponential waste? Dump it back into the dustbins of history? Put it into orbit, send it into space? It will be no easier getting rid of the corpse of reality. In desperation, we shall be forced to turn it into a special attraction, a historical tableau, a nature reserve: `Coming to you live from reality! Visit this strange world! Experience the thrill of the real world!
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
“
Since then, several other conjectures have been resolved with the aid of computers (notably, in 1988, the nonexistence of a projective plane of order 10). Meanwhile, mathematicians have tidied up the Haken-Appel argument so that the computer part is much shorter, and some still hope that a traditional, elegant, and illuminating proof of the four-color theorem will someday be found. It was the desire for illumination, after all, that motivated so many to work on the problem, even to devote their lives to it, during its long history. (One mathematician had his bride color maps on their honeymoon.) Even if the four-color theorem is itself mathematically otiose, a lot of useful mathematics got created in failed attempts to prove it, and it has certainly made grist for philosophers in the last few decades. As for its having wider repercussions, I’m not so sure. When I looked at the map of the United States in the back of a huge dictionary that I once won in a spelling bee for New York journalists, I noticed with mild surprise that it was colored with precisely four colors. Sadly, though, the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, which share a border, were both blue.
”
”
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
“
Hell, and what to do in the lower planes Tell people that they will go to hell if they do not convert to your particular brand of religion and you'll soon have converts knocking at your door. Sadly, many religions have used the fear of retribution to threaten their flock. The New Age philosopher David Ike summed it up for me when we met on a television show called the “Mystic Challenge.” "Religion is the most sophisticated form of brainwashing ever invented.
”
”
Craig Hamilton-Parker (What to Do When You Are Dead: Life After Death, Heaven and the Afterlife)
“
Take my words
read my poetry
make my thoughts
breathe life
why should
distances matter?
between us there
may be oceans
there may be
deserts between us
take my words
read my poetry
make my thoughts
breathe life
wrap my words
around you
as your shawl
my words
will warm your
body and soul
take my words
read my poetry
make my thoughts
breathe life
my words are
orphans since birth
give them a home
in your heart
they talk to us
words too smile
and dance
they too have life
words are tender
and sensitive too
words understand
when others may not
words are loyal
they will stay with us
words don’t leave
they will live with us
words are kind
and loving
and caring too
they make us
happy when we
may be sad
words are philosophical
they make us go deep
to understand life
and things that happen
words are our identify
words are for eternity
words make us
who we think we are
and who we become
take my words
read my poetry
make my thoughts
breathe life.
”
”
Avijeet Das
“
On one level, the poems after Verlaine in this new book are a selfish project. I wanted to try on a voice with which, despite sharing some stylistic and tonal sympathies, I seemed to have little in common. It served as a psychodramatic exercise, a walk in somebody else’s shoes. Writing each new poem while drawing on the raw material of Verlaine in translation has led me, in the always dramatised context of the individual poem, to think and say things I’d likely never have dreamed of otherwise. But just as importantly, I hope these poems paint a fresh portrait of Paul Verlaine, however partial and sketchy, that reveals him to be a more surprising, hard-thinking, and even revivifying poet than expected. Beyond his skilled conjuring of delicate and atmospheric allusiveness, at its best, his is also poetry of punchy musicality, philosophical edge, and candidness – both intellectual and emotional – which allows for genuine beauty, sensuality, and sadness.
”
”
Ben Wilkinson (Same Difference)
“
When you are feeling upset, angry, or sad,” Epictetus said, “don’t blame another for your state of mind. Your condition is the result of your own opinions and interpretations.” When anyone provokes you, remember that it is actually your own opinion provoking you. It is not the person who insults or attacks you who torments your mind, but the view you take of these things. Do not be fooled by how things first appear. With time and greater perspective, you can regain inner peace.
”
”
Epictetus (The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life)
“
Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris.
”
”
William H. Gass (On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books (Paperback)))
“
Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills
Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,
And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe
The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!
For when the tardy gloom of nectar fills
The ample bowls of demons and of men,
There lurks the feeble mouse, the homely hen,
And there the porcupine with all her quills.
Yet much remains - to weave a solemn strain
That lingering sadly - slowly dies away,
Daily departing with departing day.
A pea green gamut on a distant plain
Where wily walrusses in congress meet--
Such such is life
”
”
Edward Lear
“
Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position. Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor – it would be better to say that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions. (The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.) What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between Curtis’s detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will, the Beckettian ‘I must go on’ not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can’t extinguish it, it keeps coming back).
”
”
Anonymous
“
An Epicurean philosopher and physicist, Lucretius wrote his poem for a friend, Gaius Memmius, and urges him not to be afraid of death. ‘Death is nothing to us,’ he proclaims. If Mother Nature suddenly found a voice, she would wonder why we make such a fuss about dying. If we’ve had a good life, she would ask, why aren’t we happy to leave it, like a guest who’s had a lovely time at a party? And if we’ve had a rotten time, why prolong it? We don’t remember what it was like before we were born, and that is Nature’s mirror of how things will be after we die. ‘Surely nothing about dying seems sad. Doesn’t it seem more untroubled than any sleep?
”
”
Natalie Haynes (The Ancient Guide to Modern Life)
“
A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the eduction of forms from matter, and the relation of such forms to the higher forms which are the model of the world and have their being in the mind of God. He might well be a poet to brood on those great complementary opposites: the earthly and heavenly cities, unity and multiplicity, light and dark, equity and justice, continuity--as triumphantly exhibited in his own Empress--and ends--as sadly exhibited in his own Empress. Like St. Augustine he will see mutability as the condition of all created things, which are immersed in time. Time, he knows, will have a stop--perhaps, on some of the evidence, quite soon. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that this is not so. It will seem to him, at any rate, that his poem should in part rest on some poetic generalization-some fiction--which reconciles these opposites, and helps to make sense of the discords, ethical, political, legal, and so forth, which, in its completeness, it had to contain.
This may stand as a rough account of Spenser's mood when he worked out the sections of his poem which treat of the Garden of Adonis and the trial of Mutability, the first dealing with the sempiternity of earthly forms, and the second with the dilation of being in these forms under the shadow of a final end. Perhaps the refinements upon, and the substitutes for, Augustine's explanations of the first matter and its potentialities, do not directly concern him; as an allegorist he may think most readily of these potentialities in a quasi-Augustinian way as seeds, seminal reasons, plants tended in a seminarium. But he will distinguish, as his commentators often fail to do, these forms or formulae from the heavenly forms, and allow them the kind of immortality that is open to them, that of athanasia rather than of aei einai. And an obvious place to talk about them would be in the discussion of love, since without the agency represented by Venus there would be no eduction of forms from the prime matter. Elsewhere he would have to confront the problem of Plato's two kinds of eternity; the answer to Mutability is that the creation is deathless, but the last stanzas explain that this is not to grant them the condition of being-for-ever.
”
”
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
The recollection of past pleasure may become pain—’
‘It does,’ interposed the other.
‘Well; it does. To remember happiness which cannot be restored, is pain, but of a softened kind. Our recollections are unfortunately mingled with much that we deplore, and with many actions which we bitterly repent; still in the most chequered life I firmly think there are so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon, that I do not believe any mortal (unless he had put himself without the pale of hope) would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe, if he had it in his power.’
‘Possibly you are correct in that belief,’ said the grey-haired gentleman after a short reflection. ‘I am inclined to think you are.’
‘Why, then,’ replied the other, ‘the good in this state of existence preponderates over the bad, let miscalled philosophers tell us what they will. If our affections be tried, our affections are our consolation and comfort; and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better.
”
”
Charles Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby)
“
In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is something that abuses this name: a very narrow, imprisoned, chained type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what accords with our intentions and instincts—not to speak of the fact that regarding the new philosophers who are coming up they must assuredly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, briefly and sadly, among the levelers—these falsely so–called ‘free spirits’—being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’; they are all human beings without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy good fellows whom one should not deny either courage or respectable decency—only they are unfree and ridiculously superficial, above all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society as it has existed so far just about the cause of all human misery and failure—which is a way of standing truth happily upon her head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green–pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and doctrines which they repeat most often are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’—and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished.
We opposite men, having opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and how the plant ‘man’ has so far grown most vigorously to a height—we think that this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerousness of his situation must first grown to the point of enormity, his power of invention and simulation (his ‘spirit’) had to develop under prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life–will had to be enhanced into an unconditional power– will. We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species ‘man’ as much as its opposite does.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms. Writers and artists, mystics and philosophers, have long tried to give voice to it. García Lorca called it the “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.
”
”
Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
“
Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.
”
”
Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics)
“
Don’t marry a sad spouse,
marry a happy one.
Don’t marry an impatient spouse,
marry a forbearing one.
Don’t marry a quarrelsome spouse,
marry a pleasant one.
Don’t marry a bitter spouse,
marry a cheerful one.
Don’t marry a fussy spouse,
marry an easygoing one.
Don’t marry a mean spouse,
marry a kind one.
Don’t marry a stingy spouse,
marry a charitable one.
Don’t marry a greedy spouse,
marry a contented one.
Don’t marry an envious spouse,
marry a thankful one.
Don’t marry a shameful spouse,
marry an honorable one.
Don’t marry a prideful spouse,
marry a humble one.
Don’t marry an imprudent spouse,
marry a virtuous one.
Marry a brave spouse, not a cowardly one.
Marry a clever spouse, not a dull one.
Marry an educated spouse, not a coarse one.
Marry a hardworking spouse, not a lazy one.
Marry a prudent spouse, not an ignorant one.
Marry a decent spouse, not a rich one.
Marry a cautious spouse, not a reckless one.
Marry a rational spouse, not a senseless one.
Marry a just spouse, not a bigoted one.
Marry a tolerant spouse, not a racist one.
Marry a fair spouse, not a chauvinistic one.
Marry a strong spouse, not a weak one.
Marry a wise spouse, not a foolish one.
Marry an enlightened spouse, not a stupid one.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore.
You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe.
“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
The secret—to being you, to being Happy?” “Just keep on smiling. Even when you’re sad. Keep on smiling.” Not the most profound advice, admittedly. But Happy is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. To venture any further, though, is to enter treacherous waters. A slippery seal, happiness is. On the road, I encountered bushels of inconsistencies. The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can’t. Exasperated, I call one of the leading happiness researchers, John Helliwell. Perhaps he has some answers. “It’s simple,” he says. “There’s more than one path to happiness.” Of course. How could I have missed it? Tolstoy turned on his head. All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways. It’s worth considering carbon. We wouldn’t be here without it. Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way—in tight, interlocking rows—and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way—a disorganized jumble—and you have a handful of soot. The arranging makes all the difference. Places are the same. It’s not the elements that matter so much as how they’re arranged and in which proportions. Arrange them one way, and you have Switzerland. Arrange them another way, and you have Moldova. Getting the balance right is important. Qatar has too much money and not enough culture. It has no way of absorbing all that cash. And then there is Iceland: a country that has no right to be happy yet is. Iceland gets the balance right. A small country but a cosmopolitan one. Dark and light. Efficient and laid-back. American gumption married to European social responsibility. A perfect, happy arrangement. The glue that holds the entire enterprise together is culture. It makes all the difference. I have some nagging doubts about my journey. I didn’t make it everywhere. Yet my doubts extend beyond matters of itinerary. I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.” Yes, we want to be happy but for the right reasons, and,
”
”
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
“
Wittgenstein uses this beetle analogy to suggest that the felt states and sensations that occur in a person’s mind; things like smell, pain, love, happiness, sadness, and so on are things that no one can communicate sufficiently enough to share and reveal their experiences to others. I can never see your beetle, and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and communicate about the beetle, though, the word has to be a word that everyone understands and can be taught for the word to have any meaning. According to Wittgenstein and many others, language is entirely social. This theory is known as the Private Language Argument, which proposes that no language can be understandable if it is solely to one individual. Rather, language is only formed through shared use amongst a community of others. Thus, the sensation of something might exist exclusively to one’s self, but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively to one’s self. Meaning, we can never know if anyone experiences anything the same way we experience it, even if everyone talks about it in the same words. We can only assume. Arguably, trying to rationalize, communicate, and comprehend the mental experience of a sensation as it actually is, becomes inconceivable after a certain point. For example, one could say that fresh cut grass smells good, but when asked what it smells like, they would have to go on to say things like it smells natural or like the season of spring. If then asked, what that smells like, perhaps if one tried hard enough, they could come with a few other smells to compare it to, but they would eventually and inevitably reach the limits of language. There would be a final question of what it smells like that would have no answer. A sensation beyond words that no one besides the smeller could know for sure what is like. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein writes when referring to the notion of subjective experience and that which exceeds language and logical understanding. Beyond the suggestions of language and shared meaning, arguably what is most thought-provoking about all of this is the notion that we can never know what it feels like to be anyone else other than our self. We can never know what the world might look, taste, smell, sound, and feel like from outside our own heads. We can never verify what anyone else’s color blue looks like, or what anyone else’s punch in the arm feels like, or what anyone else’s sense of love or happiness is like. We are all locked inside our minds, yelling out to each other in an attempt to find out, but never capable of entering anyone else’s to find out for sure. Even if the framework, structure, and wiring of each of our brains are mostly identical, the unknowable conscious psychological layer on top of it all transmutes the experience of neurological occurrences into something abstract, distanced enough from the measurable and communicable to ever know exactly what any of it is, where it comes from, and how it might change in different heads. Ultimately, no matter the philosophical stance or scientific theory, it is fair to argue that at a minimum no one can or will ever know what it means to have navigated and experienced this universe in the way that you have and will. Each moment that you experience, a particular sense or image of the world with your particular conditions of consciousness, is forever yours exclusively, withholding the mystery of what it means to actually be you for all of eternity. Perhaps we all feel and experience in nearly identical ways, or perhaps we all feel and experience in very dissimilar ways. Your version of blue, your sensation of pain, your experience of love, could perhaps be its only version of blue, its only version of pain, and its only version of love to ever exist in the entire universe. The point is, we don’t know because each of us holds the answer that no one can ever access.
”
”
Robert Pantano
“
The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.
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Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
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I have seen lot of people who would sacrifice their career & would to pursue their talent & goals because of their don’t approve or don’t want them to participate in those things. This people would drop everything there are good & best at to please their partners. Some would even leave their jobs for to sit at home because their man said so. The sad part is after all sacrifice they make. The people who made them do this things. End up leaving them or abusing them. Just know. Real love show itself it doesn’t need to be proven, if you are doing all this to prove your love to your partner
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D.J. Kyos
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The monkey puzzle tree has absorbed your bad memories. It’s heard your words and read your thoughts. It will keep your memories, just like history is stored with words in a book. The monkey puzzle tree feeds off history good and bad, happy or sad. Trees are record keepers and this particular tree has more records than any other living tree. If trees disappeared, there will be no records to tell that we even existed. There will be no present, no past and therefore no future,” explained Petucan.
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Jacqueline Edgington (Happy Jack)
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There were the sad times, there were the happy times and then all the time between seems so empty now.
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Cometan (The Omnidoxy)
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Sadly, I know not clearly of the subject of physics. Instead, I learn of the complex human nature, the epic mind, The Grand Cosmos, and the unknownness beyond the edge of The Cosmos known as The Universe.
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Cometan (The Omnidoxy)
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It doesn’t cost much to be shallow,
but it costs you everything to be learned.
It doesn’t cost much to be dull,
but it costs you everything to be bright.
It doesn’t cost much to be uncultured,
but it costs you everything to be educated.
It doesn’t cost much to be mindless,
but it costs you everything to be wise.
It doesn’t cost much to be loud,
but it costs you everything to be silent.
It doesn’t cost much to be rude,
but it costs you everything to be polite.
It doesn’t cost much to be simple,
but it costs you everything to be sophisticated.
It doesn’t cost much to be careless,
but it costs you everything to be cautious.
It doesn’t cost much to be weak,
but it costs you everything to be strong.
It doesn’t cost much to be mediocre,
but it costs you everything to be great.
It doesn’t cost much to be obscure,
but it costs you everything to be famous.
It doesn’t cost much to be inferior,
but it costs you everything to be superior.
It doesn’t cost much to be relaxed,
but it costs you everything to be focused.
It doesn’t cost much to be lazy,
but it costs you everything to be determined.
It doesn’t cost much to be incompetant,
but it costs you everything to be diligent.
It doesn’t cost much to be defeated,
but it costs you everything to be victorious.
It doesn’t cost much to be narrow,
but it costs you everything to be open.
It doesn’t cost much to be shameful,
but it costs you everything to be honorable.
It doesn’t cost much to be uncouth,
but it costs you everything to be uncultured.
It doesn’t cost much to be sinful,
but it costs you everything to be virtuous.
It doesn’t cost much to be sad,
but it costs you everything to be happy.
It doesn’t cost much to be cruel,
but it costs you everything to be kind.
It doesn’t cost much to be gentle,
but it costs you everything to be firm.
It doesn’t cost much to be hasty,
but it costs you everything to be patient.
It doesn’t cost much to be backward,
but it costs you everything to be forward.
It doesn’t cost much to be down,
but it costs you everything to be up.
It doesn’t cost much to be low,
but it costs you everything to be high.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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Things go wrong, worst happens, you curse your life, luck doesn’t follow, good deeds aren’t just in your destiny, bad people ruins your routine. I have seen people surrounded by these all repeatedly to which I always question the philosophers and motivational speakers ‘Have you researched enough when you said life is all about sadness & happiness?’.
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Bhavik Sarkhedi
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Remember, you are as dispensable as the most indispensable king of kings, the mighty lord of silly worldly men.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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Its sad that most women the only time they open up about thier problems is when htey have money problems, but they hid all other problems they have.
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D.J. Kyos
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It’s sad that most of our real life problems that affect us daily, don't make it as breaking news on facebook. They are not trending on twitter or not glamorous enough for instagram and those problems are the ones that take away our happiness. The problems that other people don't know about. The ones we fight alone everyday and every night.
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D.J. Kyos
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There is nothing in the record of the human species that suggests that wrongheadedness is self-correcting, or that the capacity for rationalization cannot sustain an illusion for 2500 years and more. Nor, sadly, is there anything in that record to suggest that scientific rationalism, in medicine or anything else, is self-sustaining and thus eternally embedded in the culture that developed it. This has little to do with the actual philosophical strength of the scientific outlook, which is enormous. Rather, it is to acknowledge that some law of intellectual entropy may be a given of the human condition.
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Norman Levitt (Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture)
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To lovers out there …
It is sad that most relationships are driven by guilt and not driven by passion. You find your partner is being sweet, caring, and doing things for you because they are feeling guilty about something they are doing behind your back.
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D.J. Kyos
“
To lovers out there …
It is sad to see relationships ending because of personal problems and not because of relationship problems.
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D.J. Kyos
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It is so sad to see. That you are threaten by someone who is living their life, because they are different than you. The fact that you don't understand them. It doesn't mean you should kill them. What have they done to you , That makes you think . They don't deserve to live. They are not the problem, but it is you having problems with them, because of your insecurities.
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D.J. Kyos
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It is so sad to watch criminals fighting each other to run our country in the name of Politics. These people know each other shenanigans. They know who committed which crime , when and where. They are keeping the Information as their secret and bait. Waiting for the day, they are being caught and charged. So, they can play check mate card. To them this Is all a game. To us It Is our lives. Citizens are suffering and dying , because they are putting their hope and trust on this people. Thinking they are representing them and are trying to do good things for them. When one of this politicians is exposed. They are doing everything In their power to distract us. The day we realize we are on our own. Is the day we will take voting seriously.
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D.J. Kyos
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The sad thing about Politicians. Is that they know that they must target the poor people to get the votes. poor people who lack everything , including basic things, because of them. They go to the poor people not to help them, but to get votes from them. No remorse, No shame. Some people are just heartless. How can you take from someone who has nothing. You want the same person to support you and applaud you when you are eating. Showing off your luxury lifestyle to someone who has no basic needs, because of you.
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D.J. Kyos
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Anyway, she had had such moments before, and besides,
she was not killing herself because she was a sad, embittered
woman, constantly depressed. She had spent many afternoons
walking joyfully along the streets of Ljubljana or gazing—
from the window in her convent room—at the snow falling on
the small square with its statue of the poet. Once, for almost a
month, she had felt as if she were walking on air, all because a
complete stranger, in the middle of that very square, had given
her a flower.
She believed herself to be completely normal. Two very
simple reasons lay behind her decision to die, and she was sure
that, were she to leave a note explaining, many people would
agree with her.
The first reason: Everything in her life was the same and,
once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way,
with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of
illness, the departure of friends. She would gain nothing by
continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering would
only increase.
The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read
the newspapers, watched TV, and she was aware of what was
going on in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no
way of putting things right—that gave her a sense of complete
powerlessness.
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Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decide Morir: Una Novela Sobre La Locura)