Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not.
--
"Song about my mother" [Lied von meiner Mutter], from "Thirteen Psalms" (1920), trans. Christopher Middleton in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 40Bertolt Brecht
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The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
Stephen King
A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.
Larry Wall
[W]hen someone speaks we ought to get three things out of the message. First and least important (but still very important), we ought to get what is said. Second, and more important, we ought to have a spiritual experience. Third, and most important, we should keep the commitments we make to ourselves
Henry D. Moyle
Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I'll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks.
Peter Ustinov
The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.
Kenneth Boulding
Brecht, Bertolt
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