Denis Anderson > Denis's Quotes

“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“What's needed on Earth is love of the dark side of ourselves”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The increasingly thoughtful child can see the whole horribly upset world and would be understandably totally bewildered and deeply troubled by it”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.”
― Lois Lowry

“Mother's love created our awe-inspiring moral sense”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“Finding understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition has actually been what the efforts of every human who has ever lived has been dedicated to achieving and has contributed to finding.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The World Transformation Movement is the disseminator of this psychologically relieving and transforming, Instinct vs Intellect, ‘holy grail of insight’ explanation of the human condition—the insight humanity has tirelessly worked toward, yearned for, and now so desperately needs!”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Human Condition: What exactly is it, what caused it, and how the human race has finally liberated itself from the horror of it.

“Until the human condition could be resolved it was not safe to acknowledge the different roles men and women played in the journey to enlightenment. Over time it was found that the best way to control prejudices was to prevent acknowledgement of any substantial differences between the sexes. The dogma of politically correct culture emerged.”
― Jeremy Griffith, A Species in Denial

“While it is one thing to wish for the truth, it is quite another to cope with it”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The human condition is the immensely mentally insecure and psychologically distressed state that all humans have suffered from as a result of a clash between our species’ original non-understanding, dictatorial, instinctive orientations to the world, and our newer fully conscious mind that needs to understand the world to operate.”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Human Condition: What exactly is it, what caused it, and how the human race has finally liberated itself from the horror of it.

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Daniel H. Burnham”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“We can finally transition from living in a dreadful state of denial and delusion to living in a wonderfully TRANSFORMED STATE of freedom from all the dishonesty and delusion that made human life so fraudulent, mad, destructive and chaotic.”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Human Condition: What exactly is it, what caused it, and how the human race has finally liberated itself from the horror of it.

“While religions could not liberate humans from the agony of the human condition…they did provide an invaluable way to withdraw from the brink of madness”
― Jeremy Griffith

“The playwright George Bernard Shaw also warned of how difficult it is to introduce a new paradigm of thinking — especially one that dares to confront the historically unbearably confronting and off-limits subject of the human condition — when he said that ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska, 1919).”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Interview: How We Can Finally End All the Turmoil & Suffering in the World!

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything