“Some people forget money and IQ points often do not correlate.”
“Viu que Durham [Clive] não só era esperto como tinha também uma mente ordenada e tranquila. Sabia o que queria ler, onde estava mais fraco, e até aquilo em que os professores o podiam ajudar. Não tinha nem a fé cega nos tutores e nas aulas, como Maurice e o seu grupo, nem o desprezo professado por Fetherstonhaugh. -------------------------------------------------- p.42, MAURICE, E.M.FORSTER”
“One thing I learned from this pandemic is never overestimate the intelligence of the American public.”
“When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.”
“Colin Winters Rule of Intelligence (CWRI): Think of a person of average intelligence. Half the people are dumber than that.”
“The dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view, that the opposite is also true.)”
“He said: We must have one love, one great love in our life, since it gives us an alibi for all the moments when we are filled with motiveless despair. (November 16)”
“The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking this world to give him.”
“The only liberty possible is liberty as regards death. The really free man is the one who, accepting death as it is, at the same time accepts its consequences—that is to say, the abolition of all life s traditional values. Ivan Karamazov s Everything is permitted is the only expression there is of a coherent liberty. And we must follow out all the consequences of his remark.”
“If to love implies spending one s life loving, and creating a particular kind of life, then pure love is a love which is dead. It becomes nothing more than a point of reference, and we still need to seek an understanding about all the rest”
“For a man who is nobly born, happiness lies in taking on the fate of everyman; not through a desire for renunciation but a will to happiness. To be happy, you need time. Lots of time. Happiness too is a long patience. And it is the need for money that robs us of time. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be rich means having time to be happy when you are worthy of happiness.”
“You would not write about loneliness so much if you knew how to get the most out of it”
“To keep going to the end means not only resisting but also relaxing. I need to be aware of myself, in so far as this is also an awareness of something that goes beyond me as an individual. I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.”
“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way the are governed; that they gamble—yes, gamble—with a whole part of their life and their so called vital interest.”
“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble—yes, gamble—with a whole part of their life and their so called vital interest.”
“I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It s not very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity.”
“The clouds thicken over the cloister and night gradually darkens the ledger stones bearing the moral virtues attributed to the dead. If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: I recognize only one duty, and that is to love. And, as far as everything else is concerned, I say no. I say no with all my strength.”