All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
Interpretation
Time alone is essential for personal reflection and mental well-being.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie emphasizes the importance of solitude for mental clarity and emotional stability. He suggests that without the opportunity to spend time alone, one can become restless and agitated, highlighting how personal reflection and quiet time are crucial for maintaining balance in one's life.
In practice
In a mental health seminar discussing the importance of downtime.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
Some of us are returning to sanity, because we're tired of the pain. We're in a hurry. No time to mess around.
One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.
If you become more concerned for the welfare of others, you will experience a sense of calm, inner-strength, and self confidence.
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
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