Jean Toomer Quotes

There's a certain darkness to Slipknot, but at the same time, there's a very strong dose of positivity. Stone Sour is the same way. There's a certain melancholy that comes with the slower stuff, but at the end of the day there's also that other side that is very positive. It's all how you deliver.

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater." But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Without pain, we couldn't know joy.

Happiness is one pole, sadness is another. Blissfulness is one pole, misery is another. Life consists of both, and life is richer because of both. A life only of blissfulness will have extension, but will not have depth. A life of only sadness will have depth, but will not have extension.

The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.

I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.

I'm not a big proponent of happiness. I think it's highly overrated. I think misery is underrated. There's so much value in that. You can't have one without the other.

You cannot dissociate birth from death, creation from destruction, good from evil. Thus any art is a form of drama standing between the two extreme poles of birth and death, just like life is drama. This is not sad, because to be alive means to be mortal, to pass through.

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

If the ego rises, all else will also rise; if it subsides, all else will also subside.

Just because we believe the gospel is a life-and-death matter doesn't mean we have to act as if we're dead.

Ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure ... if it is not rising into pleasure will be falling towards pain.

Passion lends them power, time means to meet, tempering extremities with extremes sweet.

The same love that made me laugh makes my cry.

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Because to tell you the truth, most of the time dying seems pretty much like my only means of escape

Trying to figure things out was my gig. Without the human condition, there's no struggle, no pain and that means no laughter.

Perhaps there could be no joy on this planet without an equal weight of pain to balance it out on some unknown scale.

To shut down the ability to feel pain means you shut down all emotions, joy included. It makes our hearts feel small, it robs us of our joy, and really keeps us no safer.

Because hate's just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don't know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can't exist without the other.

A perfect schedule is to be able to do something dark and then go into something lighter to ease up a little bit.