A Quote by Doris Lessing
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves - these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself.
What interests us is not the person who is pitying himself or who is sitting, stewing in their pain and their suffering. What interests us is the person who's overcome it, who's doing their best to move away from it.
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.
You walk into a restaurant these days, and what you see is everyone with their phone next to them. That is terrible. Instead of concentrating on the relationship, on the needs and activities and interests of the other person, they are constantly looking at their phone.
I think we are trying to run the space age with horse and buggy moral and spiritual equipment. Technology you see has no morals; and with no moral restraints man will destroy himself ecologically, militarily, or in some other way. Only God can give a person moral restraints and spiritual strength.
Don't make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.
Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.
And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person...that solitude was what one relished the most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?
The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy.
All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses.
So the dream is continually reminding us of the part which our conscious is forgetting. It does not speak with any absolute authority; it simply gives a true picture of a situation which exists in the unconscious. It speaks truth; but not, as some persons believe, the truth. It shows the other side.
The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was not made to conceal or destroy the apple, but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple-not the apple for the picture.
Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself. But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.
Because we can't comprehend it, and that's what allows us to do it again. And it is the normal, it's the average person that can do this. Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we'd have done it. That's the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, 'were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?'
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