“One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.”
Djuna Barnes book Nightwood
Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls
“One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.”
Djuna Barnes book Nightwood
Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls
Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography
Source: Inventing the Future (1963), p. 161
“A weak invention of the enemy.”
Act V, scene 3. Similar thought in William Shakespeare, King Richard III.
Richard III (altered) (1700)
Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido
Source: Budo (1938), p. 31
Context: When facing the realm of life and death in the form of an enemy's sword, one must be firmly settled in mind and body, and not at all intimidated; without providing your opponent the slightest opening, control his mind in a flash and move where you will — straight, diagonally, or in any other appropriate direction.
Merold Westphal (1940)
Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 35
“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”
Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale
Source: The Thirteenth Tale
Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist
Quoted in Engaged Buddhist Reader: Ten Years of Engaged Buddhist Publishing (1996) by Arnold Kotler, p. 106
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Context: When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
“Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.”
José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader
George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States
2000s, 2001, Freedom and Democracy Are Under Attack (September 2001)