#lexi

I don't really have preferred roles except those with some complexity. ↗

— Richard Roxburgh

#except #i #preferred #really #roles

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207) ↗

— Alain de Botton

#engineering #literature #simplicity #words #writing

When the Chief Justice read me the oath,' he [FDR] later told an adviser, 'and came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States" I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy. ↗

— Susan Quinn

#democracy #flexibility #roosevelt #supreme-court #art

L'art de vivre consiste à accepter. Les choses sont ce qu'elles sont et, là aussi, comme dans les différences fondamentales entre races, on ne peut rien changer. ↗

— Albahari

#reflexion #art

Surely slavery was not tolerated in Kentucky, surely not in Lexington, which the captain so often called the Beautiful City. Everything would be different once they arrived in paradise. There'd be neither black nor white--there'd be people. Cynthia had been neither schooled nor conditioned for prejudice. ↗

— David Dick

#lexington #beauty

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#flexibility #intelligence #open-mindedness #wisdom #change

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#flexibility #humorous #personal-development #personality #self

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#animal #associations #case #complexity #delicacy

Can I get you anything? A drink? A fresh change of clothes? A membership card to Hypocrites International? ↗

— Erin McCarthy

#humor #change

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory. ↗

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

#biochemical-phenomenon #cause-and-symptom #disinhibition #doctors #drugs