Main Street (1920)
Context: I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Just give us a bit more time and we’ll produce it; trust us; we’re wiser than you!' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now— and we're going to try our hands at it.
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Sinclair Lewis 136
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright 1885–1951Related quotes
“The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Alvin Journeyman (1995), Chapter 3.
Book I, Chapter 1, p. 23
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
As quoted in the "Homi Jehangir Bhabha" profile at the Vigyan Prasar Science Portal http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/bhabha/BHABHANEW.HTM
Context: I know quite clearly what I want out of my life. Life and my emotions are the only things I am conscious of. I love the consciousness of life and I want as much of it as I can get. But the span of one's life is limited. What comes after death no one knows. Nor do I care. Since, therefore, I cannot increase the content of life by increasing its duration, I will increase it by increasing its intensity. Art, music, poetry and everything else … I do have this one purpose — increasing the intensity of my consciousness of life.
Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Fourth Lecture, p. 74.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)