Vulgar Motivational Quotes

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Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people's weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there's no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.
Epictetus (The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness)
Ah cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They are They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!
Albert Camus (The Fall)
I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)
Cyber bullying occurs online daily. Most don't consider their actions or words to be bullying. Here's a few clues that you're a cyber bully. (1) You post information about someone in order to ruin their character. (2) You post threats to someone. (3) You tag someone in vulgar degrading posts. (4) You post any information intended to harm or shame another individual seeking to gain attention. Then, you are a cyber bully and need to get some help.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana (Sweet Destiny)
Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic.
Christopher Hitchens (Why Orwell Matters)
Epicurus founded a school of philosophy which placed great emphasis on the importance of pleasure. "Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life," he asserted, confirming what many had long thought, but philosophers had rarely accepted. Vulgar opinion at once imagined that the pleasure Epicurus had in mind involved a lot of money, sex, drink and debauchery (associations that survive in our use of the word 'Epicurean'). But true Epicureanism was more subtle. Epicurus led a very simple life, because after rational analysis, he had come to some striking conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable - and fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive. The first ingredient was friendship. 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship,' he wrote. So he bought a house near Athens where he lived in the company of congenial souls. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not. Epicurus and his friends located a second secret of happiness: freedom. In order not to have to work for people they didn't like and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens ('We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics'), and began what could best have been described as a commune, accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They would have less money, but would never again have to follow the commands of odious superiors. The third ingredient of happiness was, in Epicurus's view, to lead an examined life. Epicurus was concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise. Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus's argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
Alain de Botton
It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would only be unconditional if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty 'no' to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say 'yes' from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people's lives... how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated...
László Krasznahorkai (War & War)
They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it is quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what is the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs,cherami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never! Besides, let us not beat about the bush; I love life--that is my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life. Such avidity has something plebeian about it, don't you think?
Albert Camus (The Fall)
The sequel [to The Silmarillion and The Hobbit], The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business – an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic ‘Homeric’ horsemen, orcs and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose. We are to see the overthrow of the last incarnation of Evil, the unmaking of the Ring, the final departure of the Elves, and the return in majesty of the true King, to take over the Dominion of Men, inheriting all that can be transmitted of Elfdom in his high marriage with Arwen daughter of Elrond, as well as the lineal royalty of Númenor. But as the earliest Tales are seen through Elvish eyes, as it were, this last great Tale, coming down from myth and legend to the earth, is seen mainly though the eyes of Hobbits: it thus becomes in fact anthropocentric. But through Hobbits, not Men so-called, because the last Tale is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in ‘world politics’ of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil). A moral of the whole (after the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies) is the obvious one that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)
All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness.
G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
Somehow it was not the fault of the born adventurers, of those who by their very nature dwelt outside society and outside all political bodies, that they found in imperialism a political game that was endless by definition; they were not supposed to know that in politics an endless game can end only in catastrophe and that political secrecy hardly ever ends in anything nobler than the vulgar duplicity of a spy. The joke on these players of the Great Game was that their employers knew what they wanted and used their passion for anonymity for ordinary spying. But this triumph of the profit-hungry investors was temporary, and they were duly cheated when a few decades later they met the player of the game of totalitarianism, a game played without ulterior motives like profit and therefore played with such murderous efficiency that it devoured even those who financed it.
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Avoid Most Popular Entertainment Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there’s no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.
Epictetus (The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness)
They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it is quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what is the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs,cherami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never! Besides, let us not beat about the bush; I love life--that is my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining whatis not life. Such avidity has something plebeian about it, dont you think?
Albert Camus (The Fall)
And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre. In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up. There was no alternative. Through deep if misplaced affection for you: through great pity for your defects of temper and temperament: through my own proverbial good-nature and Celtic laziness: through an artistic aversion to coarse scenes and ugly words: through that incapacity to bear resentment of any kind which at that time characterised me: through my dislike of seeing life made bitter and uncomely by what to me, with my eyes really fixed on other things, seemed to be mere trifles too petty for more than a moment's thought or interest – through these reasons, simple as they may sound, I gave up to you always. As a natural result, your claims, your efforts at domination, your exactions grew more and more unreasonable. Your meanest motive, your lowest appetite, your most common passion, became to you laws by which the lives of others were to be guided always, and to which, if necessary, they were to be without scruple sacrificed. Knowing that by making a scene you could always have your way, it was but natural that you should proceed, almost unconsciously I have no doubt, to every excess of vulgar violence. At the end you did not know to what goal you were hurrying, or with what aim in view. Having made your own of my genius, my will-power, and my fortune, you required, in the blindness of an inexhaustible greed, my entire existence. You took it.
Oscar Wilde
Nu înţelegeţi ce vreau să spun? Trebuie să vă mărturisesc că mă simt obosit. Pierd şirul vorbei şi nu mai am acea minte limpede atât de mult lăudată de prietenii mei. Spun prietenii mei, din principiu. Căci nu mai am prieteni, ci numai complici. În schimb, aceştia sunt mai numeroşi şi reprezintă întreaga omenire. Şi, printre ei, primul sunteţi dumneavoastră. Cel de lângă tine e totdeauna primul. Cum ştiu că n-am prieteni? E cât se poate de simplu: am descoperit că n-am prieteni în ziua în care m-am gândit să mă omor, spre a le juca o farsă zdravănă, spre a-i pedepsi, într-un anume sens. Dar m-am pomenit că n-aveam pe cine pedepsi. Câţiva ar fi fost surprinşi; dar nimeni nu s-ar fi simţit pedepsit. De altminteri, chiar dacă aş fi vrut, tot nu mi-ar fi folosit la nimic. Dacă aş fi putut să mă sinucid şi apoi să-i văd ce mutră fac, atunci, da, ar fi meritat. Dar pământul e negru, iubite prieten, lemnul e gros, giulgiul des. I-aş fi văzut cu ochii sufletului, e adevărat, dar numai dacă există un suflet şi dacă acest suflet are ochi. De asta însă nu suntem siguri, nu suntem niciodată siguri de nimic! Altminteri, ar exista o ieşire, am izbuti să fim luaţi în serios. Numai propria-ţi moarte îi convinge pe oameni de temeinicia motivelor tale, de sinceritatea ta, de adâncimea suferinţei tale. Atâta vreme cât trăieşti, cazul tău e îndoielnic, n-ai dreptul decât la scepticismul lor. De aceea, dacă ar exista fie şi numai o şansă de a te bucura de spectacol, ar merita să le dovedeşti ceea ce nu vor să creadă, uimindu-i. Dar aşa, te omori şi ce însemnătate mai poate avea dacă ei cred sau nu, de vreme ce tu nu mai eşti de faţă spre a te desfăta cu mirarea sau cu căinţa lor, de altminteri atât de scurtă, spre a asista, aşa cum îşi visează fiecare om, la propria-ţi înmormântare. Ca să nu mai fii îndoielnic, trebuie să nu mai fii, pur şi simplu. Şi oare nu-i mai bine aşa? Nepăsarea lor ne-ar face să suferim mai mult. "O să mi-o plăteşti!" îi spunea o fată tatălui ei, care n-o lăsase să se mărite cu un adorator, prea fercheş după gustul lui. După care s-a omorât. Dar tatăl n-a plătit nimic. Îi plăcea la nebunie pescuitul. După trei duminici, s-a întors la râu, ca să uite, zicea el. Şi nu se înşela: a uitat. La drept vorbind, de mirare ar fi fost dacă s-ar fi întâmplat altminteri. Crezi că mori spre a-ţi pedepsi nevasta şi de fapt îi redai libertatea. De aceea e mai bine să nu vezi. Ca să nu mai vorbim ce rişti să-i auzi vorbind despre ceea ce socotesc ei a fi fost pricina sinuciderii tale. Parcă-i aud: "S-a omorât fiindcă n-a mai putut îndura să..." Ah! dragă prietene, ce puţină imaginaţie au oamenii! Ei cred întotdeauna că te sinucizi pentru un motiv oarecare. Dar poţi să te sinucizi foarte bine pentru două motive. Lor nu le dă însă prin cap una ca asta. Şi atunci, la ce bun să mori de bună voie, să te sacrifici pentru ideea pe care vrei să şi-o facă despre tine? Căci, o dată mort, vor profita de asta spre a explica gestul tău prin tot felul de motive idioate sau vulgare. Martirii, dragă prietene, trebuie să aleagă între a fi uitaţi, batjocoriţi sau folosiţi. Căci înţeleşi nu vor fi niciodată.
Fjodor Dostojevski
To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road. Yegey in the Hall of the Thirty-Three today: 'I unalterably oppose this blockade of grain-exports to Karhide, and the spirit of competition which motivates it.' Right enough, but he will not get off the Mishnory road going that way. He must offer an alternative. Orgoreyn and Karhide both must stop following the road they're on, in either direction; they must go somewhere else, and break the circle.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient. His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror. After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23
Richard Marius (Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death)
Those who habitually spew curses and vulgarity reveal a heart inhabited by darkness, allowing the enemy of our souls to manipulate their tongues and poison the atmosphere. Let us instead strive to tame our tongues, speak life and blessing, and yield our words to the Holy Spirit's guidance, that we may be a light in the darkness and a reflection of Christ's love.
Shaila Touchton
Caring not for Angoulême’s vulgar October jests,’ Reynart leaned back from the table, his belt loosened, ‘today we drink a fine label and a fine vintage, Witcher. We can afford it, we’ve made some money. We can revel.’ ‘That’s right,’ Geralt beckoned to the innkeeper. ‘After all, as Dandelion says, perhaps there are other motivations for earning money, but I just don’t know any.
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Lady of the Lake (The Witcher, #5))
One of the prime motivators behind the lock step political organization of evangelical Christians is an idea of a "war on Christianity." It's a testament to the efficacy of that false victim mentality that a country built on the separation of church and state has been co-opted by supposed followers of Christ who peddle the same sort of venal, profane, blasphemous, manipulative, soul-selling, fear-mongering, false idol worshipping bull shit. There's nothing wrong with turning the other cheek and humbling yourself before the idea of a higher power and treating one another as you would be treated--with dignity and respect. Unfortunately, that's not the substance of mega-church, imperial, for-profit Christianity. Instead we've got pestilent little golems sucking the life blood out of Americans with promises of divine grace and eternal salvation that amount to abstract snake oil used to lubricate their own materialism. That's the Christianity that people willfully antagonize. That's the Christianity that alienates anyone whose aversion to false morality is greater than their fear of life without a con man's blessing. That's the sort of vulgar perversion of spirituality that cheapens the symbolic cross and leads a nation away from the yoke of power hungry pastors who preach whatever gospel keeps them in control of the coffers. You want a ministry? Live it. Take off your fancy suit. Give up your mansion. Wash those feet. Crucify your ego. Bless the whores. Forgive the sinners. Live it. Otherwise you're nothing but another leach preying on weakness to aggrandize your own mortal ambitions.
Dan Johnson (Catawampusland)
in Kantian ethics, the true tension is not between the subject’s idea that he is acting only for the sake of duty, and the hidden fact that there was effectively some pathological motivation at work (the vulgar psychoanalysis); the true tension is exactly the opposite one: the free act in its abyss is unbearable, traumatic, so that when we accomplish an act out of freedom and in order to be able to sustain it, we experience it as conditioned by some pathological motivation
Slavoj Žižek (Sex and the Failed Absolute)