I had a friend once who thought it wrong to be disagreeable. She spent 18 years agreeing as best she could. Then one day she decided she could be disagreeable and 18 years worth of disagreeableness came out. It was quite painful for all concerned. She realized then that if she had let the disagreeable out more often, but in smaller doses, it wouldn’t have been so painful.
“The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.” – Walter Bagehot
The older I get the more I realize this is true. Great art is not something done in a tub of luke warm water, it’s done with the passion and focus of the bees.
What do you think it takes to create great art?
“The artists, like the bees, must put their lives into the sting they give.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember when I was burned severely as a teenager. My friends didn’t think they could handle it if it happened to them. And I remember realizing at that point and afterwards that ‘handling it’ is much more about what you take from the experience than going through the experience. Going through ‘the experience’ is often pretty automatic in some ways especially if you are in intense pain, turmoil or grief and you are not always consciously thinking about how to ‘handle it’. But, who do you end up being afterwards – Better or bitter, courageous or more fearful? That is the important question.
So, does that mean those who hold grudges, keep resentment inside (or out) don’t understand? I would think if you tried to argue with them that they should forgive someone they might say ‘but you don’t understand!’ What is that all about?
I am in a long productive conversation with a friend who also happens to be a Pastor. And we were talking about the Governor Spitzer case and how is wife was standing up there with him during his mea culpa. One question is: Does showing some level of forgiveness, albeit only on the surface, by standing up with him send a message that what that person did was ok?
“Men love war because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.” – adapted from a longer quote by John Fowles in ‘The Magus’. Here is the complete quote for context.
“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
“Life cannot go on without much forgetting.” – Honore Balzac
As someone who commented on this quote said ‘But what to remember and what to forget, that is the question.’ I understand the quote since I feel my life is much happier because I don’t remember a lot of bad things, and if I do remember them I don’t obsess with them and become bitter over it. But on the other hand I know I have forgotten too many things that are of value too.
“That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end.” – Francis Quarles
I wonder if it really shouldn’t say ‘That friendship will not continue to the end that CONTINUES for an end’. The beginning of something can often have a reason, a motive, an end. But if the friendship develops beyond that, then that ‘end reason’ sort of dissipates and no longer drives the friendship, right?
