“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”
~ Hannah Arendt; german-american political theorist and philosopher.
“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.”
~ Susan Sontag; american author, filmmaker, teacher and activist.
“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”
~ Margaret Mead; american cultural anthropologist, author and speaker.
“Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.”
~ Martha C. Nussbaum; american philosopher and professor of law and ethics.
“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. I’ve learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.”
~ Martha Washington; american first lady to the first president.
“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”
~ Helen Keller; american author, activist and lecturer.
“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”
~ Margaret Fuller; american journalist, critic, women’s rights activist and translator.
“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.”
~Susan B. Anthony; american social reformer, philosopher and activist.
“The constant evasion of emotional experience has created an immaturity which turns all experience into traumatic shocks from which the human being derives no strength or development, but neurosis.”
~ Anais Nin; french-american author, poet and journalist.
“The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.”
~ Oscar Wilde; irish author, poet, playwright, critic and aesthete.