Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
--
“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 191Randall Jarrell
» Randall Jarrell - all quotes »
I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man...It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go -- that's the horrible thing.
Rose Wilder Lane
We must warn here against wanting to play the hero, against wanting to be a warrior at one’s own expense, against wanting to be one’s own teacher who determines the degree of suffering and calculates the advantages. We must warn that no one is tried in a self-made conflict but is only cultivated in a new vanity so that the last becomes worse than the first. But then we are also reminded that suffering is a component and no one enters the kingdom of heaven without suffering. Just to be reminded of it is instructive, lest the distress of spiritual trial come upon one as unexpectedly as a thief in the night, as birth pangs to one who had no presentiment of giving birth.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Perhaps you would say: Who would want to deny that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above? But not wanting to deny it is still a very long way from wanting to understand it, and wanting to understand it is still a very long way from wanting to believe it. Does the fruit of the knowledge here again seem so delectable that instead of making a spiritual judgment you demand and identifying sign from the good and the perfect, a proof that it actually did come from above? How should such a sign be constituted? Should it be constituted? Should it be more perfect than the perfect, better than the good, since it is assumed to demonstrate, and it pretends to demonstrate, that the perfect is the perfect. Should it be a sign, a wonder? Is not a wonder the archenemy of doubt, with which it is never combined? p. 135
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.
Martin Amis
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard
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