A Quote by David Sedaris
In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.
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“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”
Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
I'm in the saddle every day playing a screwball. And then somebody comes along and says, "How would you like to go to Italy and Spain and do an Italian/Spanish/German co-production with an Italian director who's only directed one movie?" It wasn't like I was going there to be with Federico Fellini. But something was there, and I thought, Well, I loved this story when it was told by Akira Kurosawa; maybe this is a good idea. That's an instinctive moment. A Fistful of Dollars was made.
No act of virtue can be great if it is not followed by advantage for others. So, no matter how much time you spend fasting, no matter how much you sleep on a hard floor and eat ashes and sigh continually, if you do no good to others, you do nothing great.
Jason glanced at the creature. It remained the same distance away as before, still as a statue. "What do you want?" Jason asked. No answer. "Are you the thing that followed Tark? You should keep following him. He's the real mastermind. Shoo. Go hide." No response. "Okay, how about you stand guard while I sleep. Keep the giants away. Sound good? All in favor, hold perfectly still. Fine, I guess we have a deal.
Believe it or not, the biggest obstacle for a business owner with any size business is the internal response to the question - 'Now what?' Often this question is followed by a - deer in the headlights - response, which is then followed by stagnation. Following stagnation comes fear.
Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same."
I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.
Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.
Find a gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it and by using that pause to collect ourselves and shift our response
When I first began working in Japan, I had to confront the Japanese people's excessive worship for foreign goods and the fixed idea of what clothes ought to be. I wanted to change the rigid formula of clothing that the Japanese followed.
The question then is, how much are you willing to give?" And I answered, "Anything." A breath later, Zane echoed my response with, "Everything.
The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.
what is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter?
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