Michael Foley Quotes & Sayings

The happiness state, when examined more closely, turns out not to be a point but a range, with contentment at the bottom and exaltation at the top ... there are probably as many forms of happiness as there are of depression. — Michael Foley

But who, in the Western world, has not been deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment? Who has not yearned to be younger, richer, more talented, more respected, more celebrated, and, above all, more sexually attractive? Who has not felt entitled to more and aggrieved when more was not forthcoming? It is possible that a starving African farmer has less sense of injustice than a middle-aged Western male who has never been fellated. — Michael Foley

Only a determined and resourceful scholar could establish manuscript precedence - but in the race to masturbate on a printed page Proust definitely came first. — Michael Foley

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo. — Michael Foley

As royalty, celebrities and the rich have always known, a smile is the most subtle and satisfying way of shitting on the inferior. — Michael Foley

Proust is famous for his rhapsodies on hawthorns but his book has only three of these, whereas there are thirteen scenes in brothels, one especially detailed episode running to more than forty pages. Few critics mention the brothels but they are more fun than the hawthorns. — Michael Foley

It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design. — Michael Foley

In sex women are largely guided by their sensible bodies but men are driven crazy by their feverish minds. Men love to think and talk about sex; women enjoy it while it lasts, if they can, and have little interest in pre-match build-up or post-match analysis. — Michael Foley

To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life. — Michael Foley

Snobbery management is as difficult and necessary as anger management. — Michael Foley

Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing. — Michael Foley

After a lifetime of engaging in long, passionate discussions I have come to the conclusion that it is a waste of time trying to convince anyone of anything. — Michael Foley

It may well be that an analysis of figures would reveal a law - the duration of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. Or, to put it another way, any union celebrated with personalized toasting flutes is doomed. — Michael Foley

However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise. — Michael Foley

Employees hate meetings because they reveal that self-promotion, sycophancy, dissimulation and constantly talking nonsense in a loud confident voice are more impressive than merely being good at the job - and it is depressing to lack these skills but even more depressing to discover one's self using them. — Michael Foley

94 per cent of us think we do above-average work. — Michael Foley

But there is a compelling reason to develop a personal strategy for living. Rejecting issues, which often feels liberating, is actually enslavement. Those who do not produce their own solutions must be using someone else's. As Nietzsche warned 'he who cannot obey himself will be commanded'. — Michael Foley

So a contemporary wedding is like the Olympic Games, a spectacle of detailed research and preparation but lasts only a short time. Even if it all goes according to plan, a wedding is over in a day, much of it spent being ordered around by photographers, and when the audience is gone and the costumes returned to their boxes (never again to be taken out), an ordinary man and woman look to each other and think: 'Is this all it is? — Michael Foley

The drive to make everything lightweight is depriving us of the the deep reassurance of heft. — Michael Foley

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint. — Michael Foley

The perfect servant is the one who attends to all the master's whims - anyone can do that - but the one who anticipates the whims. — Michael Foley

Day offers two equally necessary sacraments - the benediction of morning and the absolution of dusk. In the morning coffee blesses and in the evening wine absolves. — Michael Foley

Snatch religion back from the clerics and literature from the critics. — Michael Foley

Desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled — Michael Foley

The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit. — Michael Foley

So the absurdity of happiness is that it is embarrassing to discuss or even mention, impossible to define or measure, may not be achievable at all - or, at best, only intermittently and unconsciously - and may even turn into its opposite if directly pursued, but that it frequently turns up unexpectedly in the course of pursuing something else. There is no tease more infuriating ... It is tempting to forget the whole thing and simply fall back on the couch with a remote control in one hand and a beer in the other. — Michael Foley

Put any two people together and each will seek ways of feeling superior to the other. If a ship went down in the Pacific and a single sailor managed to swim to a desert island, would he be pleased to see, ten minutes later, another sailor emerging from the surf? Quite possibly - but only if the new arrival accepted that the first man was now a landed aristocrat while he himself was an illegal immigrant. — Michael Foley

And a sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos. — Michael Foley