"The Risk Taker" http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,635799,00.html, profile/interview by Gary Younge, The Guardian (19 January 2002)
Context: I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
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Vincent Van Gogh 238
Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890) 1853–1890Related quotes
“I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?”
Appreciating Imagination http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=241 (1997)
Context: It's pretty simple, the ethical life - it's just demanding... The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is - unless you're at Esalen - you should clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple others - obvious - things to be done. It's not about how many prostrations you do, or what lineage you've associated yourself with, or how much cholesterol is in your diet. And somehow we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices - probably because we have been too infected by the memes of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity - because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming - that's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy - the quietude of Asian religion, I think.
“I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.”
As quoted in The Martians of Science : Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (2006) by István Hargittai, p. 251
"What I Believe", The Listener, 1929. Quoted in Clifton Fadiman, I Believe, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1940.
Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter I, Section IV, On Value, p. 19
“I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.”
Lord Illingworth, Act III
A Woman of No Importance (1893)