Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward AbbeyRead
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote criticizes societal norms that accept sickness as standard while viewing health as unusual.
Edward Abbey's quote reflects on the paradoxical nature of modern society, suggesting that we have come to accept sickness as a common state of being, rather than striving for health. It highlights the irony in which the majority's acceptance of illness renders those who are healthy as 'abnormal', questioning the values and perceptions that shape our understanding of wellness and normalcy.
Themes
SocietyHealthSicknessNormalcyPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a discussion on public health policies.
More from Edward Abbey
All quotes →I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
Edward AbbeyRead
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward AbbeyRead
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Edward AbbeyRead
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.
Edward AbbeyRead
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
Edward AbbeyRead
Similar quotes
Our government, conceived in liberty and purchased with blood, can be preserved only by constant vigilance. May we guard it as our children's richest legacy, for what shall it profit our nation if it shall gain the whole world and lose “the spirit that prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere”?
William Jennings BryanRead
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
Abraham VergheseRead
This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.
Henry David ThoreauRead
I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
Fernando PessoaRead
Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.
Philip YanceyRead
INADMISSIBLE- Not competent to be considered. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible ... but there is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence.
Ambrose BierceRead