There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
Interpretation
Focusing on your own life can be more stimulating than engaging in the affairs of others.
This quote suggests that by concentrating on one's own circumstances and decisions, a person can provoke thought and reflection in themselves and others. It implies that the act of minding one's own business often leads to greater insights and can challenge societal norms, encouraging others to reconsider their actions and judgments.
In practice
In a discussion about personal boundaries and self-care.
God save the Queen and a fascist regime β¦ a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
Language is a virus from outer space.
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and donβt know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.
when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.
The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.
That's one of the greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race, memory.
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain β although it may think it can β the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.
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