It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
Interpretation
The underlying reasons behind people's thoughts matter more than the thoughts themselves.
Eugene Ionesco's quote suggests that understanding the motivations and contexts behind a person's beliefs is more crucial than the beliefs themselves. This perspective invites deeper inquiry into human thought processes and encourages us to look beyond surface-level judgments, recognizing that personal experiences and societal influences shape opinions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about psychology and how people's backgrounds influence their opinions.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing.
Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.
The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.
The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.
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