If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for a world that values emotions and sentimentality.
Christopher Isherwood's quote reflects a profound belief in the importance of sentiment in human life. It suggests that a world devoid of emotional connection and genuine feelings is undesirable and lacking in humanity. By emphasizing sentiment, Isherwood champions the need for empathy, love, and connection in society, portraying them as essential elements for a fulfilling existence.
In practice
In a speech advocating for emotional intelligence in education, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of feelings.
The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.
A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.
What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
You know that you are. Don't burden yourself with names, just be. Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Great men cultivate love...only little men cherish a spirit of hatred
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.
. . .only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.