Ethicist Nytimes Quotes & Sayings

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her. — Cesare Pavese

These days, shame is emerging from the shadows and beginning to have its own identity. For example, if you talk about guilt to people under thirty, you often get blank stares. But if you talk about "worthless," "failure," or "shame," they feel as if you have deciphered the core of their being. For them, shame is arguably the human problem. If the next generation is talking about it, that's a good sign, in the sense that shame may soon receive the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, you won't hear about it on the national news nor even in many Sunday sermons. It's hard to know how to speak about the unspeakable. You don't mention shameful things in polite conversation. — Edward T. Welch

More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look — Mindy Kaling

Resolved untested was moot. — Laura Lee Guhrke

That's a shame. I'm sure somebody, somewhere, cares. — Derek Landy

To be missed, disappear for a while, but not for a long while, or else you shall be forgotten! And the sun practice this very well! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigured with sores, or above all deceased? A dead host, after all, is hardly going to provide long-term hospitality. — Bill Bryson

But any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to make a little pearl, or egg, or something ... — Edna O'Brien

Pierre-Jean Jouve writes: "poetry is a soul inaugurating form". The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the "form" was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from "commonplaces", before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it. — Gaston Bachelard

What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be
not seem
outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined
as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one's own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more. — James Baldwin

The Waverley sisters had married men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange. — Sarah Addison Allen

Each week, I post a video about some 'Pigeon of Discontent' raised by a reader. Because, as much as we try to find the 'Bluebird of Happiness,' we're also plagued by those small but pesky 'Pigeons of Discontent.' — Gretchen Rubin

It is indeed a wondrous universal alchemy, is it not? When one's heartfelt intentions cause mountains to move. — Jacqueline Winspear

The life that you want begins the moment you embrace the life you have because all of it is a miracle. — Rob Bell