Sophie Swetchine Quotes

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

The popular culture says . . . Do what you do, your life is predestined, like the installment plan on your house. There's not much you can do about it. Make your payments, live it, get sick, die, don't make any trouble. It is the Master Charge of destiny. Try to get your high credit rating.

One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

The first practice is the practice of undiscriminating virtue: take care of those who are deserving; also, and equally, take care of those who are not. When you extend your virtue in all directions without discriminating, you feet are firmly planted on the path that returns to the Tao.

If you make the choice to just go with the flow, that is a choice to make a difference in a negative way.

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!

Tolerance is something you don't like, but put up with.

Wisdom and policy dictate that we must do as destiny demands and keep peace with the irresistible march of events.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Well if you can’t get what you love, You learn to love the things you’ve got .. If you can’t be what you want, You learn to be the things you’re not .. If you can’t get what you need, You learn to need the things that stop you dreaming

There is a chalk outline slowly being drawn around common sense and most people can't identify the victim.

It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.

I get up, because I’m supposed to, but if it were up to me, I’d stay in my seat for the rest of time.

And so we plough along, as the fly said to the ox.

Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.

Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.

To know what virtue is is not enough; we must endeavor to possess and to practice it, or in some other manner actually ourselves to become good.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

I have to wear heels. There are some things that you just have to do.

To take the world as one finds it

They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that didn't fit in with what they were used to believing.