Leafy Quotes

Recently added

The newest book quotes in the Leafy Quotes collection — passages readers have just added, each with its author, book and the page it came from.

  1. The 'meaning' of life is not to be found in anything other than that life itself. It is within it, and there is nothing beyond that. 'Meaning' cannot spill over from being; it is the direction, the movement of being, and nothing more. The 'meaning' of a proletarian's life is to be found in that life itself: in its despair, or conversely in its movement towards freedom, if the proletarian participates in the life of the proletariat, and if that life involves continuous, day-to-day action (trade-union, political...).

  2. Fez gave her a squeeze. “You’re a genius, Sam-I-Am.”

    She squirmed away from him uncomfortably. “It just makes sense, is all.”

    “Sometimes that’s all it takes to be a genius.”

    p. 387

  3. The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years

  4. Ninety percent of life was being there, and the rest was being there on time.

    p. 389

  5. Appearance and reality [...] are not separated like oil and water in a vessel, but rather amalgamated like water and wine. To separate them, we must analyse them in the most 'classic' sense of the word: the elements of the mixture must be isolated.

  6. To see things properly, it is not enough simply to look. People who look at life - purely as witnesses, spectators - are not rare; and one of the strangest lessons to be learnt from our literature is that professional spectators, judges by vocation and witnesses by predestination, contemplate life with less understanding and grasp of its rich content than anyone else. There really is no substitution for participation!

  7. Nothing stays the same, Gina, nothing works forever. If I don’t like it, that’s too bad. If you don’t like it, that’s still too bad.

    p. 113

  8. The Beater has still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don’t slow down, we’re gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn’t happened that way. So they’d all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old—hell, not even growing up.

    p. 109

  9. Meditation was such a loose term; you can do almost anything mentally and call it meditation.

    p. 35

  10. Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked ‘mouthwash.’

    p. 57

  11. When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.

  12. Old responses live long, die hard, and frequently leave a troublesome corpse.

    p. 245