“The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.”
Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 80.
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Alain de Botton146
Swiss writer 1969Related quotes
“When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author
Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist
Love bridges the chasm. <br class="br"> Raymond, p. 83 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=107 <br class="br">Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)
Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia
Address to the United Nations (1963)
Context: Conflicts between nations will continue to arise. The real issue is whether they are to be resolved by force, or by resort to peaceful methods and procedures, administered by impartial institutions. This very Organization itself is the greatest such institution, and it is in a more powerful United Nations that we seek, and it is here that we shall find, the assurance of a peaceful future.
Vannevar Bush book As We May Think
As We May Think (1945)
Context: The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist
Source: 1980's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1981, p. 185 - Beuys' statement on planting seven thousand oaks in Kassel, in 'Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama'
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
Sin
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice
"Learning and Science", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association in honor of Professor C. C. Langdell (June 25, 1895); reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). p. 67-68.
1890s