Joan Sutherland Quotes

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

In truth, the world is a complicated place.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

I am fascinated by the whole process of what it's like to be alive, whether it's unbelievably uncomfortable and horrible or whether it's quite nice.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

'Moonlight' isn't an issue film. It's not about addiction, it's not about sexuality, it's not about identity. It's about all these different layers, because they are all a part of the character.

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.

You are the Universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone

The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.

Man is the apex of the only world we can ever know.

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows.

We didn't make the world. All we have to do is live in it.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the multiple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnelhouses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of comers and goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

The world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.

The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.