W. G. Sebald Quotes

Humility is really important because it keeps you fresh and new.

My wife Patrice, in addition to being enormously supportive, has taught me a lot about life. She might argue it's because I have so much to learn. One of the most important things I've learned is the art of listening.

The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

Humility is becoming a lost art, but it's not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.

When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.

If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

The more you learn about someone, how could you not want to protect them and their rights? The more you learn about a culture or a certain identity, it's hard to not feel empathy.

We have to learn from the past.

I love everything about the human experience.

We think the ability to rattle off people you are grateful to and thankful to is often sort of a proxy for openness to learning from others.

Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

Learning from one's enemies is the best way to love them, for it puts one into a grateful mood toward them.

Instead of showing up to let everyone know how great we are, show up to find out how great everyone else is.

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

Explore your web: the needs, the beliefs, and the emotions that are controlling you so there's more of you to give and so you can appreciate what's driving other people. It's the only way our world's going to change.

People can be cruel,' he says with a sympathetic look that makes me trust him even more. And right then I realize that he is not writing down all my words in a file, which I really appreciate, let me tell you.

The poor have much to teach you. You have much to learn from them.

Acceptance is what we wish for ourselves and often deny others.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

What is most important subject you have to learn in life? To learn how to love. This is the challenge that life offers you: to learn bow to love. Not just to accumulate information without knowing what to do with it. But through that love, let that information bear fruit.

Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.