(Misquoted) Allen Ginsberg on the Greatest Minds
“I saw the best minds of my generation working to get more banner ads clicked.”
Allen Ginsberg (misquoted by @mschechter)
Jerry Colonna on Work
“Work does not have to destroy us. Work can be the way in which we achieve our fullest self.”
Jerry Seinfeld on Marriage
“You don’t do what’s right. You do what makes the other person feel good.”
The next line is, of course, “and the first step of that is lying.” This is a real good summary of marriage, though, and a thing I’d do well to improve on in my own marriage.
Depression’s Insights & Laughter’s Forgiveness
“I would call this condition clarity, not depression; humor and depression are two different, but not mutually exclusive, responses to it. I know we’re told to regard depression as a disease, its victims no different from people who succumb to cancer or diabetes. But because it’s a disease whose symptoms take the shape of ideas, it can get hard to parse out pathology from worldview. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once told me that ‘there are people who have no delusions; they’re called clinically depressed.’ Depression’s insights aren’t necessarily invalid; they’re just not helpful. Depression uses clarity as an instrument of torture; humor uses it as a setup. Comedy tells us, ‘But wait – that’s not the good part.’ Depression condemns the world, and us, as hateful; laughter is a way of forgiving it, and ourselves, for being so.”
Tim Kreider via Kleon
Slomo on the Most Absurd, Stupid Way to go Through a Life
“I reckon what I’m talking about is my experience in the middle part of life. The large part is a grinding affair, working away, having a family, making the whole thing happen and, at the end of it, most people are pretty worn out. They don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in anything beyond this ephemeral existence that we’re in now, their attitudes are cynical. They’re what we call “assholes.” And I was one of them.
It occurred to me one time when I was driving to work — I had a lot of reports to dictate that day — that I was still shoveling shit. Which had been the way I started my life on the dairy farm. If I look back on it, I’m just thinking, “this is the most absurd, stupid way to go through a life that a person could ever dream up.” But we’re all being pushed on to do this. And then I had the opportunity to stop.”
Sensational video. Don’t know how they make it hit so well, but it does. Go. Watch!
Frederick Buechner on The Fearsome Blessing of Hard Times
“The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we’re told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under impact of the great cosmic explosion that brought it into being in the first place. I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that—sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris, to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last.”
Maya Anglou on Legacy
Oprah: What will my legacy be?
Maya Angelou: You don’t get to decide what your legacy is. That’s not up to you. So do your work.
Recounted by Tom Shadyack
David Foster Wallace on the Value of Education
“[…] this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”
Thelonious on Genius
“A genius is the one most like himself.”
Joie de Vivre
“Joie de vivre: a cheerful enjoyment of life; an exultation of spirit. […] may be seen as a joy of everything, a comprehensive joy, a philosophy of life.”
And more from an excerpt in Carl Rogers’ book On Becoming a Person:
Mrs. Oak illustrates this trend rather nicely in her thirty-third interview. Is it significant that this follows by ten days the interview where she could for the first time admit to herself that the therapist cared? Whatever our speculations on this point, this fragment in-dicates very well the quiet joy in being one’s self, together with the apologetic attitude which, in our culture, one feels it is necessary to take toward such an experience. In the last few minutes of the inter-view, knowing her time is nearly up she says:
C: One thing worries me and I’ll hurry because I can always go back to it – a feeling that occasionally I can’t turn out. A feeling of being quite pleased with myself. Again the Q technique, I walked out of here one time, and impulsively I threw my first card, “I am an attractive personality”; looked at it sort of aghast but left it there, I mean, because honestly, I mean, that is exactly how it felt – a well, that bothered me and I catch that now.
Carl Rogers in On Becoming a Person, emphasis mine