What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s 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 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.
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.
A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.
One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to believe in it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else— the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film or speaker banned because otherwise he himself might be harmed.
The forces of good and evil are working within and around me, I must choose, and in a free will universe I do have a choice.
When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.
And, inasmuch [as] most good things are produced by labour, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
You say somebody’s guilty, everybody believes you. You say they’re innocent, nobody cares.
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