Neel Quotes & Sayings

Prasanta, who was later going to be sorry to see Purba go, experienced the dazed detachment someone feels when events they ignited go far beyond a reasonable trajectory they had imagined. — Neel Mukherjee

Madness is like wine: small amounts are inspiring, but too much can make you ill. — Neel Burton

What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance. — Andrew Neel

So Sona does what he has perfected: he becomes two persons, an outer one that goes through the motions required of him, and an inner one that is the true, pure he. — Neel Mukherjee

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves. — Neel Burton

Why do you pray if you doubt you are heard? — Alexandra David-Neel

I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials. — Alice Neel

Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal. — Neel Burton

True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. — Neel Burton

When I eat, I always pick out the best parts in the middle and leave everything else on the side. It becomes a big sculptural mess, but there are nice compositional elements about how it all sits on the table. — Elizabeth Neel

It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much. — Neel Mukherjee

Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work. — Neel Mukherjee

One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both. — Neel Burton

If you paint the world in black and white you lose its colour. — Neel Burton

It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint. — Alice Neel

Anxiety, says Kierkegaard, is the dizziness of freedom. — Neel Burton

To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book. — Neel Mukherjee

Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus abouth the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? — Neel Mukherjee

It takes ten good decisions to make up for one disastrous one. This is why it is better not to make nine good decisions than to make one bad one - which is what happens most of the time. — Neel Burton

Philosophy is an act of seduction between one true lover and another, most often the philosopher and himself. — Neel Burton

Work defines our lives and our place in the world. — Neel Mukherjee

Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving. — Neel Burton

Unlike 'mere' medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences. — Neel Burton

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside. — Neel Mukherjee

When they reach what Sona assumes to be Ashish Roy's room, he notices that a hurricane lamp has been placed aleady on a wooden stool. It casts more shadows than it illuminates. — Neel Mukherjee

I don't read my books, so I don't allow myself the dangerous luxury of toying with the idea of doing things differently. — Neel Mukherjee

Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it? — Neel Mukherjee

The wise expect nothing, hope for nothing, thus avoiding all disappointment and anxiety. — Alexandra David-Neel

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. — Neel Burton

In refining their senses and aesthetic judgement, blind tasters become much more conscious of the richness not only of wine but also of other potentially complex beverages such as tea, coffee, and spirits, and, by extension, the flavours in food, the scents in the air, and the play of light in the world. For life is consciousness, and consciousness is life. — Neel Burton

Corvina's got it wrong. Penumbra's schemes didn't fail because he's a hopeless crackpot. If Corvina's right, it means nobody should ever try anything new and risky. Maybe Penumbra's schemes failed because he didn't have enough help. Maybe he didn't have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat - until now. Corvina — Robin Sloan

Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great; it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it. — Alexandra David-Neel

Neel's model might match the store's volume but never its density — Robin Sloan

Very few of us are capable of being Free Thinkers, needing neither to adore nor to insult God, the insult often being an act of faith more profound than adoration. — Alexandra David-Neel

I see my work as having a relationship to the visual world, not just some emotive residue of my feelings. It relates to something that exists, or might exist, rather than a transcendent mental state or something like that. — Elizabeth Neel

One must be very strong, or very stupid, or completely exhausted to face life with indifference. — Alexandra David-Neel

Apple Stores produce more sales per square foot than any other retailer in the United States, including luxury stores like Tiffany. — Neel Doshi

You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything. — Alice Neel

The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it. — Alice Neel

Resentment is a powerful and corrosive force, both on the slippery left and the slippery right, and the history of humankind can largely be read as a history of resentment. Aside from a profound philosophy of capital, what we really need is a profound psychology and philosophy of resentment. We must learn to live for ourselves, without reference to the other, and, at the same time, to rise above and beyond ourselves. Or else history will keep repeating itself, and our life will be a living death. — Neel Burton

Our life is just as long or short as our memory, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking. — Neel Burton

Not for the first time in his life he felt himself fall into the gap between felings and their articulation in language. — Neel Mukherjee

This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people's lives because your own is just empty, dead time. — Neel Mukherjee

My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that. — Neel Burton

It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made. — Neel Burton

Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons - something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing - but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me. — Neel Mukherjee

Numbers never lie; one can make them, of course, as one can make anything speak another story in another tongue, but they do not have the inherent falsehood that words carry. — Neel Mukherjee

Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness. — Neel Burton

The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right? — Neel Mukherjee

Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image ... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment. — Neel Burton

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience. — Neel Burton

The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education. — Neel Burton

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.' — Neel Mukherjee

The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers. — Neel Burton

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. — Neel Burton

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people. — Alice Neel

You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is ... unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far. — Alice Neel

No one ever pays to learn the most important things. — Neel Burton

I can see the Milky Way. It's like the smudge of a cosmic giant's fingerprints on the inky black sky. And stars - so many millions and millions of them that, if I let my eyes unfocus for a bit, they too become a smear in the sky. — Neel Mukherjee

The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us. — Neel Burton

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf. — Robin Sloan

You're eating like a sparrow nowadays. You've hardly touched your food.' 'You give me so much. There are so many dishes.' 'Where so many? One dal, one fry, one vegetable dish, a bit of fish, that's it.' 'And you don't think that's a lot?' 'You've eaten like this all your life,' she said, baffled. 'Don't you agree we eat too much?' 'Who, you and I?' she asked, still puzzled. 'No, no, by "we" I mean all of us, everyone in our social and economic class. — Neel Mukherjee

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul. — Neel Mukherjee

Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes. — Andrew Neel

As I get older it gets harder and harder to hold on to the ephemeral excitement. When a documentary, or a screenplay, or even just a brainstorming session is going well I get to experience sense of hope, and expansiveness, even if it's just for a moment. — Andrew Neel

We live in a global village, Neel, where billions of voices babble simultaneously, and in this village a new hierarchy is being established, a new caste-system is being created. Only this time, it is money that sets the tone. Whoever has the most money buys the biggest loudspeaker and is the neo-Brahmin of this new world order. If the ninety-year-old neo-Brahmin on the other side of the earth is terrified of antibiotic resistant flesh-eating bacteria, we must think twice before offering treatment to a twenty-four-year old here. These are the new rules of our global village. — Anirban Bose

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula. — Robin Sloan

According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and thereby transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a much more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man. — Neel Burton

Remember that what seems zeitgeisty today is the cause of tomorrow's bafflement or, worse, ridicule. — Neel Mukherjee

When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive. — Neel Burton

Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius. — Neel Burton

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist. — Alice Neel

It was enough that I knew my soul sang, I didn't have to break into minstrelsy. — Neel Mukherjee

People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. — Neel Mukherjee

One writes what one can, or has to, write. — Neel Mukherjee

all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. — Neel Mukherjee

Let the prisoner go. She's not here for your amusement nor for your pleasure. — Neel Kay

Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money. — Neel Burton

I don't call myself an 'independent filmmaker'. Either a concept works within a studio system or it doesn't. If it does then you should try to get a studio budget so that you can use all of the tools they have to get what you want. If it doesn't then you look elsewhere, or make it yourself. — Andrew Neel

The freedom fighters in India's long struggle for independence from British rule, or members of the African National Congress, were once classed as terrorists. History, as they say, is written by victors, but history also has many cunning corridors - how much time must elapse before all those tricky side-passages are revealed? — Neel Mukherjee

It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years' time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal. — Neel Burton

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence
you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform. — Alice Neel

The things that people laugh about most are their errors and inadequacies; the difficult challenges that they face such as personal identity, social and sexual relationships, and death; and incongruity, absurdity, and meaninglessness. These are all deeply human concerns and challenges: just as no one has ever seen a laughing dog, so no one has ever heard about a laughing god. — Neel Burton

The very purpose of an ego defence such as reification (or indeed any ego defence) is, as the name implies, to protect and uphold a certain crystallized notion of self or 'I'. There is therefore an important sense in which the reifying self is itself reified. — Neel Burton

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe. — Neel Burton

Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. — Neel Burton

In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind. — Neel Burton

I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare. — Elizabeth Neel

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. — Neel Mukherjee

Battles are won one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible.This is known as the piecemeal solution. — Neel Mukherjee

The unsuspected is the daily fare of the traveler in Thibet ... — Alexandra David-Neel

Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen. — Neel Mukherjee

Work cannot convey the almost voluptuous sweetness of the feelings experienced ... in solitude. — Alexandra David-Neel

Man cannot bear to be in the wrong. As soon as he feels guilt or remorse, he bends his ethics to suit himself. Actions do not flow from ethics, but ethics from actions, and it is by refining our actions that we refine our ethics. — Neel Burton

If you're sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world. — Alice Neel

All experience is great providing you live through it.
If it kills you, you've gone too far. — Alice Neel

Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late. — Neel Burton

The two greatest warriors are Truth and Time. Be sure to march behind, and not against, them. — Neel Burton

The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy's head. — Neel Mukherjee

While 'Rap Trax!' recorded, Neel found some scrap paper and we started writing our first lyrics. Bandying about subject matter and title, we got stuck on the idea of 'cool', so my first rap song became 'Pretty Cool'. It was a symbol of our confidence. We weren't awesome cool or mega cool. We were only ... pretty cool. — Nikesh Shukla