Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Lawrence DurrellRead
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Interpretation
Our environment shapes our thoughts and actions significantly.
Lawrence Durrell's quote emphasizes the profound impact that our surroundings, both natural and social, have on our behavior and mindset. It suggests that we are not only influenced by the physical landscape but also by the cultural and emotional landscapes we inhabit, highlighting the interconnectedness between place and identity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about environmental psychology in a class or seminar.
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
I hope that when I'm 90 years old, I've accomplished a legacy that isn't all about me. I hope it's a legacy about the people who our foundation helps.
There is a dark side in all of us. And for us 'bad' people, the bad side dominates. I think there is a great sadness in villains, and I have tried to put that across. We cannot stop ourselves doing what we are doing.
The descent to the infernal regions is easy enough, but to retrace one's steps, and reach the air above, there's the rub.
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