Bakewell Quotes & Sayings

Mastery is not measured by the number of terrible things you eliminate from your life, but by the number of times you eliminate calling them terrible. — Neale Donald Walsch

Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game — Will Durant

Friends?" He asked me offering his right hand.
"As long as you don't touch my pencils' box again, — Tionne Rogers

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom', — Sarah Bakewell

Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so. — Sarah Bakewell

From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live. Thus, he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility. — Sarah Bakewell

Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides ... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together. — Sarah Bakewell

I certainly know what it is like to go to work and leave your baby at home. It is an ache that only other mothers can understand. I always say that it feels like you've left a limb at home. And I really struggled for the first few months of work. There were times when I shut myself in my room and cried. — Leigh-Allyn Baker

Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up. — Sarah Bakewell

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Seneca did this too: Place before your mind's eye the vast spread of time's abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity. — Sarah Bakewell

for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. — Sarah Bakewell

He looked terrified as he snaked his hand beneath her arm, entwining their fingers together. Their hands fit like a lock and key. It had been years since they had simply held hands, and she wished they had never stopped. — Marissa Meyer

There was a day when one could honestly and innocently enjoy the sheer pleasure of a good sticky toffee pudding; when ice cream was nice cream and Bakewell tart really was baked well. Tastes change, though, and the world of the sweet has often been sour, having to go through some dramatic overhaulage in order to keep pace. Whilst a straightforward sausage and a common kedgeree maintain their hold on the nation's culinary choices, the pudding has to stay on its toes to tantalise our taste buds. From low fat through to no fat, from sugar free through to taste free; what the next stage is we can only wait and see ... '
CILLA BUBB. Don't Desert Your Desserts — Jasper Fforde

When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on telling me stories I have heard before. — Roger Ebert

Youatt gives an excellent illustration of the effects of a course of selection which may be considered as unconscious, in so far that the breeders could never have expected, or even wished, to produce the result which ensued - namely, the production of the distinct strains. The two flocks of Leicester sheep kept by Mr. Buckley and Mr. Burgess, as Mr. Youatt remarks, Have been purely bred from the original stock of Mr. Bakewell for upwards of fifty years. There is not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with the subject that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's flock, and yet the difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties. — Charles Darwin

Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will. — Sarah Bakewell

You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, — Sarah Bakewell

He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. The would fall on each other, cluster in a raucous group, and pass whole evenings complaining about the barbarity of the locals. These were the few who actually noticed that locals did things differently. Others managed to travel so 'covered and wrapped in a taciturn and incommunicative prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere' that they noticed nothing at all. — Sarah Bakewell

As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.] — Sarah Bakewell

Many authors also attacked the widespread corruption among lawyers. In general, justice was recognized as being so unjust that, as Montaigne complained, ordinary people avoided it rather than seeking it out. He cited a local incident in which a group of peasants found a man lying stabbed and bleeding on a path. He begged them to give him water and help him to his feet, but they ran off, not daring to touch him in case they were held responsible for the attack. Montaigne had the job of talking to them after they were tracked down. "What could I say to them?" he wrote. They were right to be afraid. In another case he mentions, a gang of killers confessed to a murder for which someone had already been tried and was about to be executed. Surely this ought to mean a stay of execution? No, decided the court: that would set a dangerous precedent for overturning judgments. — Sarah Bakewell

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell?divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and eveningApollo and the sweet Muses of the Light? You enterprised a railroad?you blasted its rocks away? And, now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton. — John Ruskin

Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. — Sarah Bakewell

Seneca had an extreme trick for practising amor fati. He was asthmatic, and attacks brought him almost to the point of suffocation. He often felt that he was about to die, but he learned to use each attack as a philosophical opportunity. While his throat closed and his lungs strained for breath, he tried to embrace what was happening to him: to say "yes" to it. I will this, he would think; and, if necessary, I will myself to die from it. When the attack receded, he emerged feeling stronger, for he had done battle with fear and defeated it. — Sarah Bakewell

Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich. — Sarah Bakewell

it was one of the many petty weaknesses Montaigne cheerfully acknowledged, adding: If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off - though I don't know. — Sarah Bakewell

Life is the stuff of miracles. — A.D. Posey

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) — Sarah Bakewell

In the games of queens and kings, we leave our dreams at the door and we make do with what we have. Sometimes if we're fortunate, we still manage to have a good life. — Melina Marchetta

Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue. — Ambrose Bierce