A Quote by Michael Dirda
At any given moment, I've always assumed that nearly everyone around me was smarter than I was, more naturally gifted, quicker-witted, and probably capable of understanding Heidegger and Derrida.
Related Quotes
I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.
In terms of being able to adapt to any situation on any given night, in any given moment and that just comes with nearly twenty years of experience and paying attention to the guys that I've tried to emulate throughout my career.
With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me.
The people are immensely likable— cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian. The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn't get much better than this.
I've always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I've been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I've looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.
The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.
Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.
I am a naturally buoyant person. I am a naturally energetic person... always have been. I have to say that it's important for everyone, but especially for women (given our bone density issues) to walk - even ambling for a couple of miles is better than not walking at all.
Anything is possible, and the truth is any human being at any given moment, no matter how good they are - not only at their job but also as a person - they're capable of anything, and it's not always a conscious thing.
We Floridians have always assumed an arrogant mastery over our natural environment. And we have always presumed ourselves capable of obliging the water that is all around us to behave itself.
That's why everybody loves to tune in and watch these fights, because at any given moment, any given fight, any given fighters, anything can happen. A fighter could win nine out of 10 times, but there's always that one time.
What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.
There were millions of people who could've given up on me at any given moment, and they didn't, and so that, to me, it's the world and more.
Those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick-witted at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would have been.
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
... I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
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