Thought For The Day

[Paul Whybrow]

If there is nowadays a backlash against fiction for not dealing with “the real world”, such poppycock, then I deduce it’s a backlash against imagination, which puts before the mind what was not there before. If we ever lose our awe before this complex emanation from the personality, then we will indeed be ready for the machine age, the hegemony of incessant data and dumbed-down reading.

Paul West

 

[Paul Whybrow]

The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.

Ann Patchett

 

[Paul Whybrow]

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.

John F. Kennedy

 

[Steve C]

Not a risky thing to say and pretty obvious I would have thought but then stating the obvious is what politicians do.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Victor Frankl

 

[Paul Whybrow]

It is not what happens to you that matters, but how you react to it that matters.

Epictetus

 

[Steve C]

I think this is very true. Very often you cannot control what happens to you but you can control how you react and that's what defines a person.

 

[Geoff]

Paddington Bear

"Seagulls don't know everything ... I always keep a marmalade sandwich under my hat, just in case!"

 

[Paul Whybrow]

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Rabindranath Tagore

 

[Steve C]

Pretty bl...y obvious I would have thought. Is he talking from experience?

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information.

Dr Samuel Johnson

 

[Paul Whybrow]

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

Coco Chanel

 

[Paul Whybrow]

What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?

Hannah Arendt

 

[Steve C]

In the clouds?
On the toilet?
Scoring the winning try at Twickenham.

I go lots of places.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

To float like a cloud, you have to go to the trouble of becoming one.

Robert Genn

 

[Paul Whybrow]

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens

 

[Monarch]

I think it potentially can be, under specific circumstances, namely, after your team has won the World Cup, and you’re drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette while having a foot massage. (This from a life-long Detroit Lions fan, one of the two out of thirty-two American football teams that has never even been to the Super Bowl.)

 

[Steve C]

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

We are, by nature, dissatisfied. It's what keeps us motivated to do stuff. However, as @Monarch pointed out there are moments of supreme joy followed by a short period of relaxed contentment when the mind shuts down and leaves us in peace. They also make the best memories.

 

[Cadiz]

We are, by nature, dissatisfied. It's what keeps us motivated to do stuff. However, as @Monarch pointed out there are moments of supreme joy followed by a short period of relaxed contentment when the mind shuts down and leaves us in peace. They also make the best memories.

So true, we need those moments occasionally. They give us the motivation to get back up afterwards and go back to work!

 

[Cadiz]

So true, we need those moments occasionally. They give us the motivation to get back up afterwards and go back to work! Or get back to writing... which I don't consider 'work'.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Literature nowadays is a trade...the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.

George Gissing

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Søren Kierkegaard

 

[Paul Whybrow]

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.

George Orwell

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Find your myth and live with it.

Carl Jung

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Seneca the Younger

 

[Paul Whybrow]

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read...It is not true that we only have one life to live; if we can read, we can live many more lives and as many kinds of wishes as we wish.

S.I. Hayakawa

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all of this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronised, put-down and underpaid person.

Doris Lessing

 

[Paul Whybrow]

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

P.D. James

 

[Paul Whybrow]

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

Ogden Nash

 

[Steve C]

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

Nicely said. Most doors open inwards and most people aren't bigots. I once insisted our builder reverse a door when we built our home. Being Thai he thought I was nuts placing any importance on it but the idea of pushing a door into a visitor didn't sit right. Same with the truth I guess.