Upton Sinclair Quotes

I'm the type of person who can get a feel for what you need and what I need to do to push you to get you to a breaking point, where you realize that you can't go on this way anymore, that the reason you're heavy is because you're ignoring all the stuff that's going on inside.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?

Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

I didnt like being reminded about how self-absorbed i was. I wanted to be over this, done with this. I didnt want to live in a broken world or a broken me. I wasnt trying to weasel out of anything. I just wasnt in the mood of being on the earth that night. I get like that sometimes when it rains, or when i see certain sad movies.

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...... And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

We generally change ourselves for one of two reasons: inspiration or desperation.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

I have to convince myself that this is not a pointless life, even the body is telling me so.

There've been times when I have existential conversations with myself, and I've thought about leaving and trying to apply my education better. But ultimately it doesn't really matter. Learning how to write, learning how to write papers and structure, that's been very helpful for writing.

by thus keeping one pace ahead of myself I need never catch up with the truth.

I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.

I try to be good at it, whatever part I'm playing - even in my daily life or when the spotlight hits me on the stage to perform - I gotta be alive every second in this world. With or without the applause!

There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.

After all, conflict arises, does it not, through the desire to be something, to be other than what is.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

Inspiration is a divine element inside our life. When we are inspired, we try to climb up the Himalayas. When we are inspired, we try to swim the English Channel. When we are in spired, we go from one country to another country to inspire people and to be inspired by them. I feel that when we inspire humanity, we automatically become good citizens of the world. This is my philosophy. My weightlifting feats I have done solely to inspire humanity.

I always have a goal, even if I keep it to myself. It allows me to keep pushing myself.

Father taught us that opportunity and responsibility go hand in hand. I think we all act on that principle; on the basic human impulse that makes a man want to make the best of what's in him and what's been given him.

During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small.