Sense And Sensibility Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sense And Sensibility. Here they are! All 200 of them:

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The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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It isn't what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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When I fall in love, it will be forever.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay)
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If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
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Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
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It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;β€”it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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It is not everyone,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay)
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I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be...yours.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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She was stronger alone…
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness. [...] Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Know your own happiness.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
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Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness." -Edward Ferrars
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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It is not what we think or feel that makes us who we are. It is what we do. Or fail to do...
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)
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Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge." -Elinor Dashwood
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Elinor could sit still no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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To her own heart it was a delightful affair, to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay)
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University can teach you skill and give you opportunity, but it can't teach you sense, nor give you understanding. Sense and understanding are produced within one's soul.
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C. JoyBell C.
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to hope was to expect
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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..that sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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there’s nothing to discuss there’s nothing to remember there’s nothing to forget it’s sad and it’s not sad seems the most sensible thing a person can do is sit with drink in hand as the walls wave their goodbye smiles one comes through it all with a certain amount of efficiency and bravery then leaves some accept the possibility of God to help them get through others take it staight on and to these I drink tonight.
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Charles Bukowski (You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense)
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ΩƒΩ„Ω…Ψ§ Ψ²Ψ§Ψ―Ψͺ معرفΨͺي Ψ¨Ψ§Ω„ΨΉΨ§Ω„Ω… , ΩƒΩ„Ω…Ψ§ ΨͺΩŠΩ‚Ω†Ψͺ Ψ¨Ψ£Ω†ΩŠ Ω„Ω† Ψ£Ψ¬Ψ― Ψ±Ψ¬Ω„Ψ§Ω‹ أحبُّه Ψ¨Ψ­Ω‚!
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Ψ¬ΩŠΩ† أوسΨͺΩ† (Sense and Sensibility)
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...the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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It is the same way with dating. The time you are most prepared for dating is when you don't need anyone to complete you, fulfill you, or instill in you a sense of worth or purpose.
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Myles Munroe (Waiting and Dating: A Sensible Guide to a Fulfilling Love Relationship)
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What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exultations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them β€” the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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There is an emotional promiscuity we’ve noticed among many good young men and women. The young man understands something of the journey of the heart. He wants to talk, to β€œshare the journey.” The woman is grateful to be pursued, she opens up. They share the intimacies of their lives - their wounds, their walks with God. But he never commits. He enjoys her... then leaves. And she wonders, What did I do wrong? She failed to see his passivity. He really did not ever commit or offer assurances that he would. Like Willoughby to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. Be careful you do not offer too much of yourself to a man until you have good, solid evidence that he is a strong man willing to commit. Look at his track record with other women. Is there anything to be concerned about there? If so, bring it up. Also, does he have any close male friends - and what are they like as men? Can he hold down a job? Is he walking with God in a real and intimate way? Is he facing the wounds of his own life, and is he also demonstrating a desire to repent of Adam’s passivity and/or violence? Is he headed somewhere with his life? A lot of questions, but your heart is a treasure, and we want you to offer it only to a man who is worthy and ready to handle it well.
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Stasi Eldredge (Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul)
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Brandon is just the kind of man whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Pray, pray be composed, and do not betray what you feel to every body present
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by everybody at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience; or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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When so many hours have been spent convincing myself I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
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Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
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Piracy is our only option.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
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That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Mama, the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Mrs. Jennings was a widow, with an ample jointure. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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A woman of seven and twenty, said Marianne, after pausing a moment, can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I am excessively fond of a cottage; there is always so much comfort, so much elegance about them. And I protest, if I had any money to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself, within a short distance of London, where I might drive myself down at any time, and collect a few friends about me and be happy. I advise everybody who is going to build, to build a cottage.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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…told herself likewise not to hope. But it was too late. Hope had already entered…
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Sense will always have attractions for me.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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You may marry Miss Grey for her fifteen pounds but you will always be my Willoughby. My nightmare. My sorrow. My past. My mistake. My regret. My love.
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Shannon L. Alder
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At first sight, his address is certainly not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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And books! ...she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! Worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Feelings aren't sensible. Sometimes you fall in love with people who don't make sense. And the ones who do make sense turn out to be the wrong ones.
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Danielle Steel (Legacy)
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Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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But to appear happy when I am so miserable β€” Oh! who can require it?
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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He listened to her with silent attention, and on her ceasing to speak, rose directly from his seat, and after saying in a voice of emotion, 'To your sister I wish all imaginable happiness; to Willoughby, that he may endeavor to deserve her,' took leave, and went away.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Curse him for being all tight muscle, with ivory skin and a mouth as soft as rose petals. Curse him for having hair as fair as the sun, and eyes as black as night. Curse him for having the grace of a cat and deft, cool hands. And now I am having the same argument on paper that I have in my own head on too many nights. I know my choice is sensible, but it isn't my common sense I think with, those times Rosto's stolen a kiss from me.
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Tamora Pierce (Bloodhound (Beka Cooper, #2))
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Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...
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Margaret Drabble (Sense and Sensibility)
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I think him every thing that is worthy and amiable.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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If you don't pray often, you won't gain a love for praying. Prayer is work, and therefore it is not very appealing to our natural sensibilities. But the simple rule for prayer is this: Begin praying and your taste for prayer will increase. The more you pray, the more you will acquire the desire for prayer, the energy for prayer, and the sense of purpose in prayer.
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Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
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Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion…
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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There is a painful difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event and its final certainty.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
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He then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of an heavy rain.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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She expected from other people the same opinions and feeling as her own, and she judged their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to 'like' one another. Love governs the will: 'liking' is a matter of sense and sensibility. Nevertheless, if we really love others it will not be too hard to like them also. If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond.
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Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
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If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective β€” who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled β€” can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache.
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Stanley Kubrick
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Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.
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Anne Lamott
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Is love a fancy or a feeling.... or a Ferrars?
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
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The longer they were together the more doubtful seemed the nature of his regard, and sometimes for a few painful minutes she believed it to be no more than friendship
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Focus your attention on the quality of your words, and not the quantity, because few sensible talks attracts millions of listeners more than a thousand gibberish.
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Michael Bassey Johnson
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Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer.
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David McCullough Jr.
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He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed....
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next: that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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From a night of more sleep than she had expected, Marianne awoke the next morning to the same consciousness of misery in which she had closed her eyes.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crimeβ€”if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something moreβ€”was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.
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Jess C. Scott (The Other Side of Life)
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The mind is more sensible than heart, if you are sure listen to your heart, if you are confuse listen to your mind.
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Amit Kalantri
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...the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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You have no ambition, I well know. Your wishes are all moderate.' 'As moderate as those of the rest of the world, I believe. I wish as well as every body else to be perfectly happy, but like every body else it must be in my own way. Greatness will not make me so.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Then I will tell you something. I do not believe in it. Forty years among men has consistently taught me that they are not amenable to common sense. Show them the red tail of a comet, fill them with black terror, and they will all come running out of their houses and break their legs. But tell them one sensible proposition and support it with seven reasons, and they will simply laugh in your face
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Bertolt Brecht (Galileo)
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I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes... in a total misapprehension of character at some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why, or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.
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Edward O. Wilson
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And listen--tell your friend to try English Breakfast net time. It's a little more robust. Earl Grey is really more of a 'Sense and Sensibility' kind of tea. Cab driver to J.D. Jameson
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Julie James (Practice Makes Perfect)
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In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.
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J.G. Ballard (High-Rise)
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She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister. "I do not attempt to deny," said she, "that I think very highly of him--that I greatly esteem, that I like him." Marianne here burst with forth with indignation: "Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor. Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment." Elinor could not help laughing. "Excuse me," said she, "and be assured that I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.
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Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
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My illness, I well knew, had been entirely brought on by myself by such negligence of my own health, as I had felt even at the time to be wrong. Had I died, it would have been self-destruction.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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For to be unaffected was all that a pretty girl could want to make her mind as captivating as her person.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Very nice lady served us drinks in hotel and was followed in by a cat. We all crooned at it. Alan [Rickman] to cat (very low and meaning it): 'Fuck off.' The nice lady didn't turn a hair. The cat looked slightly embarrassed but stayed.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
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Marianne Dashwood looks at gray skies and sees blue. That's all very well, and it's not something you ever want entirely to lose. But you must lose a little of it; otherwise you're going to get wet.
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Emma Thompson
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she was oppressed, she was overcome by her own felicity; and happily disposed as is the human mind to be easily familiarized with any change for the better, it required several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any degree of tranquillity to her heart.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manner were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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El poder de separar dos personas que se quieren tan intensamente no estΓ‘ al alcance de una persona ajena.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.
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Ben H. Winters (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters)
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I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things you must risk it. And here is the shock- when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights; then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We battle ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See I told you so.' In fact, they have told you nothing.
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Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)
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You are in a melancholy humour, and fancy that any one unlike yourself must be happy. But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by every body at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience β€” or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
It was told to me, it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects, and told me, as I thought, with triumph. This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested; and it has not been only once; I have had her hopes and exultations to listen to again and again. I have known myself to be divided from Edward forever, without hearing one circumstance that could make me less desire the connection. Nothing has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to me. I have had to content against the unkindness of his sister and the insolence of his mother, and have suffered the punishment of an attachment without enjoying its advantages. And all this has been going on at the time when, as you too well know, it has not been my only unhappiness. If you can think me capable of ever feeling, surely you may suppose that I have suffered now.
”
”
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
I cannot, I cannot,' cried Marianne; 'leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! But do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of extertion!
”
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Got up this morning and could not find my glasses. Finally had to seek assistance. Kate [Winslet] found them inside a flower arrangement.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
β€œ
Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Elinor, for shame!" said Marianne, "money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
I ask Laurie if it's possible to get trained fish. Lindsay says this is how we know I've never produced a movie.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
β€œ
sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Every thing he did was right. Every thing he said was clever. If their evenings at the park included cards, he cheated himself and all the rest of the party to get her a good hand.
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”
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of any thing better from them.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Elinor was to be the comforter of others in her own distresses, no less than in theirs; and all the comfort that could be given by assurances of her own composure of mind, and a very earnest vindication of Edward from every charge but of imprudence, was readily offered.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.
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Noam Chomsky
β€œ
Make sure that when you touch the other person, all your five senses are working, because sex has a life of its own. The moment you begin, you’re no longer in control; it takes control of you. And whatever you bring to it, your fears, your desires, your sensibility will remain. That’s why people become impotent. When you have sex, take with you to bed only love and your senses, all five of them. Only then will you experience communion with God.
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Paulo Coelho
β€œ
[…] You are very right in supposing how my money would be spent – some of it, at least – my loose cash would certainly be employed in improving my collection of music and books.” – Marianne Dashwood
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
I can feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?" Grandeur has but little," said Elinor, "but wealth has much to do with it." Elinor, for shame!" Said Marianne. "Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it...
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Lady Middleton resigned herself... Contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject, five or six times every day.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
I wish, as well as every body else, to be perfectly happy; but, like every body else, it must be in my own way.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
If her case was pitiable, his was hopeless. His imprudence had made her miserable for a while; but it seemed to have deprived himself of all chance of ever being otherwise.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
By reading only six hours a-day, I shall gain in the course of a twelve-month a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Mine is a misery which nothing can do away.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
…Elinor was then at liberty to think and be wretched.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
... and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
No, no," cried Marianne, "misery such as mine has no pride. I care not who knows that I am wretched. The triumph of seeing me so may be open to all the world. Elinor, Elinor, they who suffer little may be proud and independent as they like-may resist insult, or return mortification-but I cannot. I must feel-I must be wretched-and they are welcome to enjoy the consciousness of it that can.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love. That inward beauty and invisible; Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move each part in me that were but sensible: Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, yet should I be in love by touching thee. 'Say, that the sense of feeling were bereft me, and that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch, and nothing but the very smell were left me, yet would my love to thee be still as much; for from the stillitory of thy face excelling comes breath perfum'd that breedeth love by smelling.
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William Shakespeare (Venus and Adonis)
β€œ
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
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William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
β€œ
There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.
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Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye)
β€œ
Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them. Photographer: 'Hugh, could you look less -- um --' Hugh: 'Pained?
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
β€œ
The whole story would have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
its healing powers, on a disappointed heart
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”
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Where the mind is perhaps rather unwilling to be convinced, it will always find something to support its doubts.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses -- secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -- equally vital, but unrecognised, and unlauded. These senses, unconscious, automatic, had to be discovered.
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Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales)
β€œ
Every romantic woman dreams of Willoughby. However, every wise woman’s heart knows Colonel Brandon would take care of her when she was sick, love her when she was well and know her worth every day that she breathes.
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Shannon L. Alder
β€œ
[F]or though a very few hours spent in hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron's beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men - to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve Thee as Thou hast blessed us - with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen.
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Robert Farrar Capon (The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Food))
β€œ
I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions. I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available; but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. The kind of philosophy that I value and have endeavoured to pursue is scientific, in the sense that there is some definite knowledge to be obtained and that new discoveries can make the admission of former error inevitable to any candid mind. For what I have said, whether early or late, I do not claim the kind of truth which theologians claim for their creeds. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed. I should be much surprised if subsequent research did not show that it needed to be modified. I hope, therefore, that whoever uses this dictionary will not suppose the remarks which it quotes to be intended as pontifical pronouncements, but only as the best I could do at the time towards the promotion of clear and accurate thinking. Clarity, above all, has been my aim.
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Bertrand Russell (Dictionary of Mind, Matter and Morals)
β€œ
Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader’s limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books that blunt his critical sense and damage his literary sensibility. (I, 258)
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NicolΓ‘s GΓ³mez DΓ‘vila (Escolios a Un Texto Implicito: Obra Completa (Spanish Edition))
β€œ
Elinor now found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself. She now found that, in spite of herself, she had always admitted a hope, while Edward remained single, that something would occur to prevent his marrying Lucy; that some resolution of his own, some mediation of friends, or some more eligible opportunity of establishment for the lady, would arise to assist the happiness of all. But he was now married; and she condemned her heart for the lurking flattery which so much heightened the pain of the intelligence.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Of all the ridiculous expressions people use - and people use a great many ridiculous expressions - one of the most ridiculous is 'No news is good news.' 'No new is good news' simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes such little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and cannot get themselves out. The expression might well be changed to 'No new is bad news,' except that people may not be able to contact you because they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be ;No news is no news,' except that it is so obvious it is hardly an expression at all.
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Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #8))
β€œ
Beth stared at the bowl, a fragile piece of the past, such a delicate object in Ian’s large, blunt fingers. β€œAre you certain?” β€œOf course I’m certain.” His frown returned. β€œDo you not want it?” β€œI do want it,” Beth said hastily. She held her hands out for it. β€œI’m honored.” The frown faded, to be replaced by a slight quirk of his lips. β€œIs it better than a new carriage and horses and a dozen frocks?” β€œWhat are you talking about? It’s a hundred times better.” β€œIt’s only a bowl.” β€œIt’s special to you, and you gave it to me.” Beth took it carefully and smiled at the dragons chasing one another in eternal determination. β€œIt’s the best gift in the world.” Ian took it gently back from her and replaced it in its slot. That made sense; in here it would stay safe and unbroken. But the kiss Ian gave her after that was anything but sensible. It was wicked and bruising, and she had no idea why he smiled so triumphantly.
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Jennifer Ashley (The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie (Mackenzies & McBrides, #1))
β€œ
Colonel Brandon was now as happy, as all those who best loved him, believed he deserved to be;β€”in Marianne he was consoled for every past affliction;β€”her regard and her society restored his mind to animation, and his spirits to cheerfulness; and that Marianne found her own happiness in forming his, was equally the persuasion and delight of each observing friend. Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
He admires as a lover, not as a connoisseur. To satisfy me, those characters must be united. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings: the same books, the same music must charm us both.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left β€” sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare)
β€œ
Dear, dear Norland,' said Elinor, 'probably looks much as it always does at this time of year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.' 'Oh!' cried Marianne, 'with what transporting sensations have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.' 'It is not everyone,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate a landscape even as you're diminished by it. You're suspended between sensibilities that are at odds with one another, but it's precisely within that suspension that your own identity--whether as a person or a historian--tends to reside. Self-doubt must always precede self-confidence. It should never, however, cease to accompany, challenge, and by these means discipline self-confidence.
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John Lewis Gaddis (The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past)
β€œ
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart;β€”her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don’t enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent. I, from my side, can’t deny the immense richness of these pleasures, or my addiction to them.
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Susan Sontag (Styles of Radical Will)
β€œ
Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.
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Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
β€œ
I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal -- about twenty-five, a witty control freak. I like her but I can see how she would drive you mad. She's just the sort of person you'd want to get drunk, just to make her giggling and silly.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
β€œ
Our five senses even interfere with sensible answers to stupid metaphysical questions like, β€œIf a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” My best answer is, β€œHow do you know it fell?” But that just gets people angry. So I offer a senseless analogy, β€œQ: If you can’t smell the carbon monoxide, then how do you know it’s there? A: You drop dead.” In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Death by Black Hole)
β€œ
For though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is ever made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resurrection of Edward, she had one again.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
At first sight, his address is certainly not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived. At present, I know him so well, that I think him really handsome; or at least, almost so. What say you, Marianne?
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Many were the tears shed by them in their last adieus to a place so much beloved. "Dear, dear Norland!" said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there; "when shall I cease to regret you!β€”when learn to feel a home elsewhere!β€”Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more!β€”And you, ye well-known trees!β€”but you will continue the same.β€”No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer!β€”No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!β€”But who will remain to enjoy you?
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?' (Berkeley, 1710: 25)
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George Berkeley (A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge)
β€œ
I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And here is the shock - when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See, I told you so.' In fact, they told you nothing.
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Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)
β€œ
Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?
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Andrew Sean Greer (Less Is Lost (The Arthur Less Books Book 2))
β€œ
(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters): "Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the dance, but to the waiting, in a long line for horseless vehicles of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport. P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Tomkins who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious creature." "With gratitude and apologies to Miss Austen, thank you.
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Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
β€œ
The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
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C. Wright Mills (Letters and Autobiographical Writings)
β€œ
The world had made him extravagant and vain - Extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least its offspring, necessity, had required to be sacrificed. Each faulty propensity in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him [Tsar Nicholas I] had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave them.
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Leo Tolstoy (Hadji MurΓ‘d)
β€œ
But I must object to your dooming Colonel Brandon and his wife to the constant confinement of a sick chamber, merely because he chanced to complain yesterday (a very cold damp day) of a slight rheumatic feel in one of his shoulders." "But he talked of flannel waistcoats," said Marianne; "and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with the aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old and the feeble.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Encouraged by this to a further examination of his opinions, she proceeded to question him on the subject of books; her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five-and-twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly alike. The same books, the same passages were idolized by each -- or, if any difference appeared, any objection arose, it lasted no longer than till the force of her arguments and the brightness of her eyes could be displayed. He acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all her enthusiasm, and long before his visit concluded, they conversed with the familiarity of a long-established acquaintance.
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
The thing that worries me is that I'm so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature - well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast, I think, 'Well, that's a nice-looking oak,' but it doesn't change my way of life. Now I'm not going to stand here and run down trees and flowers. Personally, I have three snake plants of my own, and in a tearoom I'm the first one to notice the geraniums. But the point is, I keep my head.
”
”
Jean Kerr (Please Don't Eat the Daisies)
β€œ
The secret killer of innovation is shame. You can’t measure it, but it is there. Every time someone holds back on a new idea, fails to give their manager much needed feedback, and is afraid to speak up in front of a client you can be sure shame played a part. That deep fear we all have of being wrong, of being belittled and of feeling less than, is what stops us taking the very risks required to move our companies forward. If you want a culture of creativity and innovation, where sensible risks are embraced on both a market and individual level, start by developing the ability of managers to cultivate an openness to vulnerability in their teams. And this, paradoxically perhaps, requires first that they are vulnerable themselves. This notion that the leader needs to be β€œin charge” and to β€œknow all the answers” is both dated and destructive. Its impact on others is the sense that they know less, and that they are less than. A recipe for risk aversion if ever I have heard it. Shame becomes fear. Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
β€œ
between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual P.erception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of "immaterial matter." This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual," a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial. \The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place oftheophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality.\ Here we shall have a good deal to say of this universe, but the word imaginary will never be used, because with its present ambiguity this word, by prejudging the reality attained or to be attained, betrays an inability to deal with this at once intermediate and intermediary world.
”
”
Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi)
β€œ
My dis-interest in what people speak of as "women's problems," "women's literature." Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing. [...] Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be faithful (to both one's writing and one's beloved)--these have nothing to do with gender. [...] The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It's her own, it's uniquely hers. Not because she is a "female" but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more "feminine" in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today....But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. [...]
”
”
Joyce Carol Oates
β€œ
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.'" Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. "One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
β€œ
What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old. It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something which would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one. So, nothing now but what she or anybody else could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for, nothing secret, or strange. Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious... It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old and new to bargaining.
”
”
Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories)
β€œ
If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath. That sensibility will run in your veins, like an antibody. You learn fairly quickly to recognise the approach of these sudden acts against you: that particular pitch or vibration in the atmosphere. You develop antennae for violence and, in turn, you devise a repertoire of means to divert it.
”
”
Maggie O'Farrell (I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death)
β€œ
I'm not surprised at Yennefer,' he said as he walked. 'She is a woman and thus an evolutionary inferior creature, governed by hormonal chaos. But you, Geralt, are not only a man who is sensible by nature, but also a mutant, invulnerable to emotions.' He waved a hand. There was a boom and a flash. A lightning bolt bounced off the shield Yennefer had conjured up. 'In spite of your good senseβ€”' Vilgefortz continued to talk, pouring fire from hand to hand 'β€”in one matter you demonstrate astounding and foolish perseverance: you invariably desire to row upstream and piss into the wind. It had to end badly. Know that today, here, in Stygga Castle, you have pissed into a hurricane.
”
”
Andrzej Sapkowski (Pani Jeziora (Saga o WiedΕΊminie, #5))
β€œ
Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began. "Go on," she said "The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up." "People like happy ending, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up." "I guess not, ma'am. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. And things go well for Anne Elliot in the end, but they don't go well for most people." My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. "I feel let down sometimes. The people in the books-the heroes- they're always so...heroic. And I try to be, but..." "...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers. "...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them," and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?" No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that." I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there. "I'm sorry, Miss Wilcox," I said, looking at the floor. "I don't mean to be coarse. I just... I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay." Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry.
”
”
Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)
β€œ
You see, I am a very prosaic, unromantic, sensible sort of fellow myself; and I have always had my heart set on finding the most sensible, prudent, level-headed wife in the world. But, on the other hand, it is very important to me that she possess one very particular flaw: she must have no sense whatsoever where I myself am concerned. She would only have to take one look at me and - no matter what her steadiness of mind - she would lose it in the space of seconds... Just lately, I have sometimes thought I may have found what I have always wanted. But just lately I have also noticed she has developed a most irritating habit of looking at the ground whenever we are together. Do you think she could try to overcome it? Well, Charlotte, are you going to look at me now?
”
”
Jane Austen (Sanditon: Jane Austen's Last Novel Completed)
β€œ
Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.
”
”
Akira Kurosawa (Something Like an Autobiography)
β€œ
The world upsets, disappoints, frustrates and hurts us in countless ways at every turn. It delays us, rejects our creative endeavours, overlooks us for promotions, rewards idiots and smashes our ambitions on its bleak, relentless shores. And almost invariably, we can’t complain about any of it. It’s too difficult to tease out who may really be to blame; and too dangerous to complain even when we know for certain (lest we be fired or laughed at). There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them. The accusations we direct at our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself – and, in their own way, a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that we can dare to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable. A
”
”
Alain de Botton (The Course of Love)
β€œ
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and niece, and their children, the old Gentleman's days were comfortably spent. His attachment to them all increased. The constant attention of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dashwood to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from interest, but from goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid comfort which his age could receive; and the cheerfulness of the children added a relish to his existence.
”
”
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
Reluctantly, he knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fit so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment buildings, for their overdeveloped sense of responsibility and lack of flamboyance. Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utencils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings. In short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated, professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbors’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, but the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (High-Rise)
β€œ
His eyes narrowed. β€œFirst, the marriage will take place. Just as soon as you’ve regained your senses and realize that tis the only sensible option left to you.” When she would have opened her mouth to dispute his assertion, he shocked her by clamping his hand over her mouth. β€œYou will be silent and allow me to finish. I have doubts that you’ve ever been able to hold your silence for more than a moment in your entire lifetime,” he grumbled. She huffed but his hand tightened on her mouth. β€œI can only assume that my son overheard me speaking to my men of our marriage. If you would have but cautioned him to hold his tongue, he would not have repeated it beyond his question to you. But now, you’ve announced our marriage to the entire clan. Some might even consider it a proposal. In which case, I accept.” He finished with a grin and then stepped back, releasing his hold on her mouth. β€œWhy … you …,” she sputtered. She worked her mouth up and down but nothing would come out. A cheer went up from the crowd assembled. β€œA wedding!
”
”
Maya Banks (In Bed with a Highlander (McCabe Trilogy, #1))
β€œ
There'll be a whole lot of things you ain't gonna want to do, but you'll have to do in this life just so you can survive. 'Now, I don't like the idea of what Charlie Simms did to you no more than your Uncle Hammer, but I had to weigh the hurt of what happened to you to what could've happened if I went after him. If I'd-a gone after Charlie Simms and given him a good thrashin', like I felt like doing, the hurt to all of us would've been a whole lot more than the hurt to you. So I let it be. I don't like letting it be, but I can live with that decision. 'But there are other things, Cassie, that if I'd let be, they'd eat away at me and destroy me in the end. And it's the same with you, baby. There are things you can't back down on. Things you gotta take a stand on, but it's up to you to decide what them things are. 'You have to demand respect in this world. Ain't nobody just gonna hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for, that's how you gain respect. But little one, ain't nobody's respect worth more than your own. You understand that?' 'Now, there ain't no sense going around being mad. You clear your head so you can think sensibly. Then I want you to think real hard about whether Lillian Jean's worth taking a stand about. But keep in mind that Lillian Jean probably won't be the last white person to think you this way.
”
”
Mildred D. Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Logans, #4))
β€œ
Of all the ridiculous expressions people use - and people use a great many ridiculous expressions - one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No new is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes such little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and cannot get themselves out. The expression might well be changed to "No new is bad news," except that people may not be able to contact you because they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "No news is no news," except that it is so obvious it is hardly an expression at all.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #8))
β€œ
I cannot express my own abhorrence of myself. Whenever I looked towards the past, I saw some duty neglected, or some failing indulged. Every body seemed injured by me. The kindness, the unceasing kindness of Mrs. Jennings, I had repaid with ungrateful contempt. To the Middletons, to the Palmers, the Steeles, to every common acquaintance even, I had been insolent and unjust; with a heart hardened against their merits, and a temper irritated by their very attention. To John, to Fanny, β€” yes, even to them, little as they deserve, I had given less than their due. But you, you above all, above my mother, had been wronged by me. I, and only I, knew your heart and its sorrows; yet to what did it influence me? Not to any compassion that could benefit you or myself. Your example was before me; but to what avail? Was I more considerate of you and your comfort? Did I imitate your forbearance, or lessen your restraints, by taking any part in those offices of general complaisance or particular gratitude which you had hitherto been left to discharge alone?
”
”
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
β€œ
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
β€œ
Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. [a bell rings] I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
”
”
William Shakespeare
β€œ
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it. Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to The Times leader writers who exult over the β€œeclipse of the highbrow” - in fact, to any β€œsensible” art-hating English person - it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be Γ¦sthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot. But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali’s merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the Γ¦sthetic sense. Since β€œMannequin rotting in a taxicab” is a good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschewismus: on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) β€œArt for Art’s sake.” Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals. It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word β€œArt,” and everything is O.K.
”
”
George Orwell (Dickens, Dali And Others)
β€œ
Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. β€œTake this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: β€œβ€™A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. β€œOne of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), β€œus, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ’The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
β€œ
But Rousseau β€” to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person β€” one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality β€” the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" β€” that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea β€” Goethe. Goethe β€” not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance β€” a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect β€” and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden β€” unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole β€” he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.
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Friedrich Nietzsche