What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Interpretation
The insignificance of bad reviews compared to the vastness of life and nature's phenomena.
In this quote, Iris Murdoch emphasizes the trivial nature of negative opinions or feedback, suggesting that they hold minimal weight compared to the grand, indifferent occurrences in the universe, such as the weather in a faraway land like Patagonia. This perspective encourages individuals to focus less on criticism and more on what truly matters in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech aimed at young entrepreneurs, one might say, 'Remember, a bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.'
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
It belongs to the very substance of nonviolence never to destroy or damage another person's feeling of self worth, even an opponent's. We all need, constantly, an advance of trust and affirmation.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.
I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others.
Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.
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