quotes about Happy Place

“This work of connecting our light to the world does not need to be done through a mass movement, or by millions of people. . . .The real work is always done by a small number of individuals. What matters is the level of participation: whether we dare to make a real commitment to the work of the soul.”

“I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.”

“Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.”

Source : John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”, Penguin Group USA

“Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality - it's just a different morality than the loud voices of the Christian morality.... I can't tell you how many films I've turned down because there was an absence of morality. And I don't mean that from any sort of Judeo-Christian-Muslim point of view. I'm not saying they're wrong and can't be made. But, fundamentally, I'm such a humanist that I can't bear to make films that make us feel humanity is more dark than it is light.”

“I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women. But I'm really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.”

“The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes-an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.”

“I'm going to have wrinkles really soon”

“The London Games will be designed for the athletes and we will provide them with the very best venues and the very best conditions to pursue their sporting dreams in London.”

“Natural selection is anything but random.”

“The past record of man is burdened with accounts of assasinations, secret combines, palace plots and betrayals in war. But in spite of this clear record, an amazing number of people have begun to scoff at the possibility of conspiracy at work today. They dismiss such an idea merely a conspiratorial point of view.”