John Dolan Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 24 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Dolan.
Famous Quotes By John Dolan
The subconscious mind, like the Good Lord, can work in a mysterious way, and mine has been known to work in a way that is completely unintelligible, if not downright barmy. — John Dolan
My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me. — John Dolan
The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid. — John Dolan
Sometimes I come across as superficial. Of this I am aware. However, you may be confident that inside my head I am forever plumbing new shallows, finding novel ways to express the obvious, reheating old jokes. — John Dolan
Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude. — John Dolan
How I love Bangkok! It's so teeming with everything that should be forbidden. I'm not just talking about the sex trade. I also mean the ways of driving, the ways of putting up buildings, environmental management arrangements, the continual attention of con artists and snatch-thieves, and the quaint local custom of peeing in side-streets. — John Dolan
As someone once said, SINCERITY is the single most important human characteristic. So once you can fake THAT, you're made. — John Dolan
And when the weariness comes and the nights are sleepless, we will tell each other stories of heroism and hope. We will feed on the memories of better times to fill our cold, empty bellies. We will strive to maintain the fiction of the journey without end, even as we see, in the distance, our final destination. — John Dolan
I would be a fully-paid-up member of the 'I Hate Paperwork Club' if I could summon the enthusiasm to fill in the application form. — John Dolan
Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse. — John Dolan
I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.
I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it. — John Dolan
I love Samui in the wee small hours. I especially love it on nights like this when the white moon stares down from the blackness like the pockmarked eye of a blind god. At such times, when the island's bright signs have paled to grey and the broom of sleep has swept the revellers to their beds, my mind's cynical crust cracks open a little, and some fanciful poetry leaks in. Then the dark hills appear to me as slumbering prehistoric leviathans, the clouds assume the air of restless ghosts, and the moon-dusted sea murmurs in some long forgotten tongue of the divine. — John Dolan
Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man's breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts. — John Dolan
I wonder briefly whether a schizophrenic Buddhist would be At Two with the universe. — John Dolan
The spirits of the dead are all around us, but it is we, the living, that are the true hungry ghosts. — John Dolan
I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason. — John Dolan
Karma means 'action'. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts. — John Dolan
Flowers, silence, departure. — John Dolan
Our children form a large part of our Immortality Project. This is one of the reasons a child's death cuts so deep; some of the future dies with them. Through them and their descendants, part of us lives on forever, just as it does in the friends we touch and the ripples our actions cause in the world. All these effects are conscripts, earthwork defences against the finality of extinction. — John Dolan
Time can move quickly when it loses its memory, or when there are no new memories to create. Reality's vulture flies down and picks at the bones of our dreams. — John Dolan
You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them. — John Dolan
Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for 'pleasure derived from the misfortune of others'? Schadenfreude. — John Dolan
Desire is a chameleon.
He blends into the brickwork and the rocks of those lanes and pathways down which we walk. He lurks like a highwayman at the crossroads of our lives, waiting to rob us of our reason.
And he does so for sport. — John Dolan
Despite the perturbations of the world, life goes on.
The sky presents an endless canopy of translucent blue. The still air is suffused with sunshine.
Perhaps tomorrow the beneficent clouds will gather and it will finally rain. The earth will cool and revive and in that seminal moment all our sins perchance will be washed away.
It might happen.
But somehow I doubt it. — John Dolan