If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for a world that values emotions and sentimentality.
Christopher Isherwood's quote reflects a profound belief in the importance of sentiment in human life. It suggests that a world devoid of emotional connection and genuine feelings is undesirable and lacking in humanity. By emphasizing sentiment, Isherwood champions the need for empathy, love, and connection in society, portraying them as essential elements for a fulfilling existence.
In practice
In a speech advocating for emotional intelligence in education, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of feelings.
The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.
A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.
What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.
Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.
Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
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