Albert Einstein Quotes

tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? and so do you.

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.

I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.

Gore Vidal said "Nixon is us, we are Nixon." I think we have to acknowledge that combination of idealism and sleaze; we want to be better than we are, and we sometimes don't face up to the real questions.

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.

In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare.

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words. You bastards, she thought. You lovely bastards. Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.

And yes, Holden would keep those kids from falling off the cliff, but WHO WOULDN'T? Does she think I would just fold my arms or give them a pat on the back before they sailed headfirst to the ground? We are all catchers, and it's sad that she doesn't see it. Instead she sees the PHONINESS, she deplores the world even after I point out that I am in it.

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

I just saw an ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was this woman-and I think it's degrading to womankind-she was going out of her mind over a new product called "A Thousand Flushes." Here she was in her toilet, saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and, "My life is complete!" Good God-if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're sick!

I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he had toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some unheard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love.

Now I just don't know who to tell to go to hell Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

I do think that some of my songs, like Take a Minute, are like the train between the two worlds. It starts out with the question of "how did Gandhi ever withstand the hunger strikes and all / he didn't do it to gain power or money as I recall," and its sweep reaches all the way to this part of the world. I think maybe I'm a translator, because I lived in both worlds and truly understand them. I understand the discontent that comes from not having. But I also understand the anxiety that comes from wealth and convenience.

You earn money, and one day money is there -- then life says to you, 'What have you got?' But you don't listen. Now you think you have to put your money into politics, you have to become a prime minister or a president -- then everything will be okay. One day you are a prime minister, and life again says, 'What have you got?' You don't listen. You go on thinking of something else and something else and something else. Life is vast -- that's why many lives are wasted.

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

Once born into childlike faith, brimming with belief, typical people begin to lose their faith. Society mocks them. Their friends smirk. They come to change the world, but over time the world changes them. Soon they forget who they were; they forget the faith they once had. Then one day someone tells them the truth, but they don’t want to go back, because they’re comfortable in their new skin. Being a stranger in this world is never easy.

Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is still infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim.

High thinking is inconsistent with a complicated material life based on high speed and imposed on us by mammon worship.

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. Just as long as there is the enthusiasm of the chase they enjoy it; but when they begin to look around, and think of settling down, they find that that part by which joy enters is dead in them. They have spent their lives in heaping up colossal piles of treasure, which stand, at the end, like the pyramids in the desert sands, holding only the dust of kings.