Quotes about condition
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“I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

Source: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 3
Context: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

“It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don't have to run into the future in order to get more.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Being Peace

Future, Happiness

“[.. ] the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cited by Tim Flannery, "Learning from the past to change our future" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/307/5706/45.full, Science, volume 307, 7 January 2005, page 45. <br class="br">Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

People

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 2
Essais (1595), Book III
Variant: Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

Dreams, Reality

“It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Variant: Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting
Context: In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting [C'est dans la connaissance des conditions authentiques de notre vie qu'il nous faut puiser la force de vivre et des raisons d'agir].

Knowledge, Drawing

“Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Love, Passion

“I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.”

Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Books, Age, Imagination, Cats

“Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.”

Sigmund Freud book The Interpretation of Dreams

Source: The Interpretation of Dreams

Change

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

Life, Death, World, Imagination

“The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

Source: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Feeling

“Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”

Salman Rushdie Shame

Source: Shame

“Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Happy, Peaceful, Freedom, Happiness

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Flowers, Lying

“public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”

Sigmund Freud book Civilization and Its Discontents

Source: Civilization and Its Discontents

Pleasure

“And yet I cannot continue in this condition! I have to remind myself to breathe — almost to remind my heart to beat!”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff (Ch. XXXIII).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: I have neither a fear, nor a presentiment, nor a hope of death. Why should I? With my hard constitution, and temperate mode of living, and unperilous occupations, I ought to, and probably shall remain above ground, till there is scarcely a black hair on my head. And yet I cannot continue in this condition! I have to remind myself to breathe — almost to remind my heart to beat! And it is like bending back a stiff spring — it is by compulsion that I do the slightest act, not prompted by one thought; and by compulsion that I notice anything alive or dead, which is not associated with one universal idea. I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned towards it so long and so unwaveringly, that I’m convinced it will be reached — and soon — because it has devoured my existence. I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfilment. My confessions have not relieved me — but they may account for some otherwise unaccountable phases of humour which I show. Oh, God! It's a long fight, I wish it were over!

Heart

“You can not entertain weak, harmful, negative thoughts ten hours a day and expect to bring about beautiful, strong and harmonious conditions by ten minutes of strong, positive, creative thought.”

Charles F. Haanel book The Master Key System

Source: The Master Key System

Beauty, Strong

“Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

Life, Books, Time

“Of course I can do this. I'm pregnant, not brain-damaged. My condition doesn't change my personality.”

Christine Feehan American writer

Source: Ruthless Game

Change, Personality

“From the philosopher Catulus, never to be dismissive of a friend's accusation, even if it seems unreasonable, but to make every effort to restore the relationship to its normal condition.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Effort

“Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Behavior, Decision

“It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Variant: It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

Decision

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

Gilles Deleuze book Dialogues

Source: Dialogues

Way

“Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition… must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Courage, Suffering

“Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

Memory, Personality

“So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Source: Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse

Time, Waiting

“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“My feelings for you are not conditional. I don't judge you. I don't lose patience with you. I don't punish you. I just love you. That's all. Pure and simple.”

Alyson Nöel book Dark Flame

Source: Dark Flame

Love, Feeling, Patience

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Nature, Happiness

“Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Feeling

“Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Pleasure

“As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Source: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Men

“One cannot alter a condition with the same mind set that created it in the first place.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant: Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.

“The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

Birth, Parting, Perfection

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

Women, Men, Hope, Art

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

Science

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.”

Austin Grossman book Soon I Will Be Invincible

Source: Soon I Will Be Invincible

“One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.”

William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair

Source: Vanity Fair

Hate, Anger

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Life, Pleasure, Cheating, Happiness

“Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.”

Maya Angelou book Mom & Me & Mom

Source: Mom & Me & Mom

Love, Star, Strong

“A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.”

V. Vale (1942) American writer

Source: Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual

Tattoo

“Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)

Children, Dead, Funny, Happiness

“UncondiTional love is a beauTiful Thing. JusT be sure To
give iT after your conditions have been meT :P”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Love, Beauty

“Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise.
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been revealed.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

World, Dreams, Thinking

“We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

World

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving

Love

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Everyone needs help. That's the human condition.”

Max Allan Collins (1948) writer

Source: Jump Cut

Help

“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Green Hills of Earth

Logic of Empire (p. 335); this is one of the earliest known variants of an idea which has become known as Hanlon's razor.
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)
Source: The Green Hills of Earth

Stupidity

“Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Home, Time, Help, Happiness

“Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Source: The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

“I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

People, Birth, Sister, Siblings

“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.”

James Lee Burke (1936) Novelist, short story writer

Source: In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Back To Work, People, Home

“It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Life

“The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Love, Nature

“Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself… know what you want.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

“There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Heart

“Misogyny… is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Life, Soul, Parting

“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman

Change

“My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Behavior, Feeling

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Sect. 318, as translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

Life, Science

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Source: Society of the Spectacle (1967), Ch. 1, sct. 1.

Life

“As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.”

Carter G. Woodson book The Mis-Education of the Negro

Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro

Change

“If I feel ragged, my prep team seems in worse condition, knocking back coffee and sharing brightly colored little pills. As far as I can tell, they never get up before noon unless there's some sort of national emergency, like my leg hair.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Color, Feeling, Coffee

“When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Chapter VIII

Country

“You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene

“This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.”

Roland Barthes book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Unfaithfulness, Forgetting

“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Back To Work, Life, Change

“The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

War

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

The Controller, Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 17
Variant: People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Source: Brave New World (1932)