Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward AbbeyRead
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes societal norms that accept sickness as standard while viewing health as unusual.
Edward Abbey's quote reflects on the paradoxical nature of modern society, suggesting that we have come to accept sickness as a common state of being, rather than striving for health. It highlights the irony in which the majority's acceptance of illness renders those who are healthy as 'abnormal', questioning the values and perceptions that shape our understanding of wellness and normalcy.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on public health policies.
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.
Although it's the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth.
'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
And I don't really have anyone upon whom I want to rain down my wrath," I said, because in truth I didn't. I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg, Margo Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I'm Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling.
If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there's no truth in us. Why then belike we must sin, And so consequently die. Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
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