What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Interpretation
This quote highlights a profound distinction between people based on their ability to find peace and rest.
Iris Murdoch's quote addresses a significant divide among people, focusing on the fundamental human experience of sleep. Those who are able to sleep peacefully experience a separation from those who struggle with insomnia or restlessness, suggesting that this division reveals deeper psychological and existential issues that can profoundly affect one's quality of life and relationships with others.
In practice
In a mental health seminar, when discussing the impacts of sleep on well-being.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs 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.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
When you are aware of space, you are not really aware of anything, except awareness itself - the inner space of consciousness. Through you, the universe is becoming aware of itself! Just as space enables all things to exist and just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are.
Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
Both force and money are impotent against ideas.
You know all the money we spend on nuclear weapons and defence every year? Trillions of dollars? Correct? Trillions. Instead, if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world,which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, not one, we could, as one race, explore outer space together in peace forever
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