Eric Rohmer Quotes

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

If I look confused it is because I am thinking.

Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be." Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

Thinking is the highest form of leverage.

We shall succeed only so far as we continue to undertake “the intolerable labor of thought” — that most distasteful of all our activities.

I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate.

One of the frustrations of having a mind trained to think and consider possibilities was that it couldn't simply be stopped once engaged.

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

I wanted to pray for an hour, but I keep thinking and thinking, and always sick thoughts, and my head aches - what is the use of praying? - it's only a sin! It is strange, too, that I am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. Men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. And so it must be, it si the law of nature, otherwise their strength would not hold out... I lay down on the sofa but I did not sleep...

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

I think that shame is a universal, paralyzing, painful emotion.

Pain is the mind. It's the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind.

To act is easy; to think is hard.

The suffering is in the mind. The mind. In the mind. Witness it. From your spiritual heart.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.

I've been in pain hope it doesn't show I've been insane well the time is slow

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

you’d think that silence would be peaceful. but really, it’s painful.

It takes me awhile to find something that I'm passionate about. I'm reading a lot and thinking a lot, and torturing myself a lot because I'm feeling really guilty for not writing something today.

People are not theirs thoughts, they think they are, and it brings them all kinds of sadness.