A Quote by Julian Barnes

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

Julian Barnes

Quote Topics

Begin Business Life Merit Reward Then Understand

Quote Author

Julian Barnes
English - Writer
Born: January 19, 1946

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

Julian Barnes

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

Julian Barnes

If merit is not recognised, still it is merit, and it ought to be honoured as such; but if it is rewarded, it becomes valuable in the eyes of all, and everybody is encouraged to pursue that course in which merit obtains its due reward.

Keshub Chandra Sen

Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution 'to each according to his merit or value.'

Robert Nozick

We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.

John Fowles

The appearances of goodness and merit often meet with a greater reward from the world than goodness and merit themselves.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

James Patterson

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

Ayn Rand

I don't think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that's something which people don't really understand.

John Shelby Spong

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Richard Dawkins

If you must begin then go all the way, because if you begin and quit, the unfinished business you have left behind begins to haunt you all the time.

Chogyam Trungpa

When people begin to understand that whatever they think and feel happens, then the psychic phenomena begin to rise, which is what's happening now.

Drunvalo Melchizedek

Only by spiritual practice can we break through our karma and the effects of the causes we have made. Only then can we escape from them. It matters not whether you have acquired any merit. Merit is merit. Karma is karma. Nonetheless, if one practices the Quan Yin Method, one can be liberated regardless of having any merit or not. It is so logical, so scientific.

Ching Hai

Basically when it comes to autistic kids and animals there's kind of three ways that they work, some of them are instant best buddies, they understand a cat, they understand a dog - they're best studies with it, they just know how to communicate with it. Then there's other kids that begin with a little bit of fear of the cat or the dog, but then they begin to like it and then there are other kids where you have a sensory problem - the cat meows and it hurts their ears, so they want to stay away from the cat because you never know when he might meow.

Temple Grandin

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.