What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Interpretation
This quote highlights a profound distinction between people based on their ability to find peace and rest.
Iris Murdoch's quote addresses a significant divide among people, focusing on the fundamental human experience of sleep. Those who are able to sleep peacefully experience a separation from those who struggle with insomnia or restlessness, suggesting that this division reveals deeper psychological and existential issues that can profoundly affect one's quality of life and relationships with others.
In practice
In a mental health seminar, when discussing the impacts of sleep on well-being.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.
People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.
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