Longer - Quotes
One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.
In the mountains, we see a valley covered by a sea of white clouds. The surface of the clouds gleams, immaculate. We start to walk toward the valley. The air becomes more humid, then less clear; the sky is no longer blue. We find ourselves in a fog. Where did the well-defined surface of the clouds go? It vanished. Its disappearance is gradual; there is no surface that separates the fog from the sparse air of the heights. Was it an illusion? No, it was a view from afar. Come to think of it, it`s like this with all surfaces. This dense marble table would look like a fog if I were shrunk to a small enough, atomic scale. Everything in the world becomes blurred when seen close up. Where exactly does the mountain end and where do the plains begin? Where does the savannah begin and the desert end? We cut the world into large slices. We think of it in terms of concepts that are meaningful for us, that emerge at a certain scale.
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
One of the big reliefs for the atheist is not having to worry about what to hope, wish, and pray for. Did I want to pray for my mother`s suffering to end? Did I want to hope for her death? I didn`t have to worry about that. I could hope one day that she`d live longer so I could talk to her, and wish the next day that she would die and not have to suffer her paralysis and physical loss any longer. My wishing and hoping were inert; I could let them run wild. I could use them as pure solace.
If an idea is not taken up and used as a solution to a problem it has no value. It becomes a non-idea. Lying in a drawer it is useless. Worse than useless, it’s a complete waste of space. Ideas have to be applied before they are recognized as good ideas. Even a bad idea executed Is better than a good idea undone. The longer it is used the better the idea is considered to be. That is why the wheel is reckoned to be the best idea ever.
It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
I love you... like the day is long! I love you more than the sun and the moon together. And if you feel the same way, then we should not hide it any longer.
I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding school where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.