Conditions Quotes - Page 4

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

Dean Koontz

Dream, Real, Ambition

Dean Koontz (2007). “The Taking: A Novel”, p.193, Bantam

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Every man has within himself the entire human condition

Michel de Montaigne

Men, Human Condition, Humans

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...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

Joyce Carol Oates

Odds, Vegetables, Victory

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..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Believe, Practice, People

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2001). “Flow: the psychology of optimal experience”

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As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.

Alan Moore

Understanding, Vietnam, Realizing

"The Transhuman Antihero: Paradoxical Protagonists of Speculative Fiction from Mary Shelley to Richard Morgan". Book by Michael Grantham, 2015.

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He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one.

Alice Hoffman

Stupid, People, Flawed

Alice Hoffman (2009). “The Story Sisters: A Novel”, p.158, Broadway Books

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You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303

Diane Setterfield

Rain, Loss, Emotional

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Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Roland Barthes

Photography, Eye, Sight

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Nothing fires the warrior’s heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowels or guts but from one’s discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions.

Steven Pressfield

Heart, Warrior, Fire

Steven Pressfield (1999). “Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae”, Bantam

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Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.

Frantz Fanon

People, Want

Frantz Fanon (1968). “The Wretched of the Earth”

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Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other.

Maya Angelou

Inspirational, Love Is, Bridges

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In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dream, Reality, Brain

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.49, Google Publishing

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Like so many things Henry had wanted in life -- like his father, his marriage, his life -- it had arrived a little damaged. Imperfect. But he didn't care, this was all he'd wanted. Something to hope for, and he'd found it. It didn't matter what condition it was in.

Jamie Ford

Father, Care, Littles

Jamie Ford (2011). “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet”, p.130, Allison & Busby

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... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.

Malcolm X

Struggle, People, Evil

Malcolm X (1992). “By any means necessary”, Pathfinder Pr

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If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Thomas Pynchon

Religious, Long, Comforting

Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.338, Penguin

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They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.

Frank Herbert

Violence, Quiet, Speak

Frank Herbert (2008). “God Emperor of Dune”, p.170, Penguin

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A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart and put it back into its normal condition, as a tough somewhat scarred but operating organ.

Martha Gellhorn

Broken Heart, Hate, Disease

Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead (2006). “The letters of Martha Gellhorn”, Vintage

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Swathed in silk, I feel like a caterpillar in a cocoon awaiting metamorphosis. I always supposed that to be a peaceful condition. At first it is. But as I journey into the night, I feel more and more trapped, suffocated by the slippery bindings, unable to emerge until I have transformed into something of beauty. I squirm, trying to shed my ruined body and unlock the secret to growing flawless wings. Despite enormous effort, I remain a hideous creature, fired into my current form by the blast from the bombs.

Suzanne Collins

Night, Journey, Wings

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These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

Anne Lamott

Children, People, Awkward

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We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

Sigmund Freud

Littles, Gains, Intense

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There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).

John Berryman

Wall, Humility, Important

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I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.

Hubert Selby, Jr.

Pain, Thinking, Here I Am

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Juliana?” the words were low and far—too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it. “Yes?” “What are you doing twenty feet in the air?” “Looking for a book.” “Would you mind very much returning to the earth?” “What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?” “I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes.” “You do indeed—particularly your extreme ability to try my patience—I believe, however, that you mean extremities.

Sarah MacLean

Husband, Believe, Book

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When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.

Eckhart Tolle

Nature, Survival, World

Eckhart Tolle (2006). “A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose”, p.30, Penguin

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When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut

Thinking, People, Slaughterhouse Five

KURT VONNEGUT JR (1969). “SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE”

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