Able Quotes - Page 7

I am comfortable in the uncomfortable.

My greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings. I'm a long way from the human being I'd liked to be, but I've decided I'm not so bad after all.

For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.

There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l'avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.

You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.

Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little.

I've just always been a reader. My grandmother just expressed the importance of literacy, if I said that correctly. She just always expressed the importance of being able to write and being able to read.

Taking all vegetable-eating nations together . . . they are a larger and much better formed race than the flesh eaters.

So much of growing up is an unbearable waiting. A constant longing for another time. Another season.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

Whatever has been achieved through pressure and violence is unstable, unreliable and incorrect.

Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.

Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The charm of Ronald Reagan is not just that he kept telling us screwy things, it was that he believed them all. No wonder we trusted him, he never lied to us. ... His stubbornness, even defiance, in the face of facts ('stupid things,' he once called them in a memorable slip) was nothing short of splendid. ... This is the man who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency.

Maybe I’ll never be able to do what I hope to, but at least I have hope.

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.