Your travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.
|
The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A . Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness...
|
The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
|
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
|
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed ... The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
|
Strong characters are brought out by change of situation, and gentle ones by permanence.
|
We're just asking people to kind of look at how they're getting their comedy a little bit differently. Since it's not joke-driven in a traditional sense, the jokes are coming out of how we ratchet up the size of the elephant in the room. If you're invested in the characters and you're onboard with them on an emotional level, that laugh will come out of a relatable place.
|
There is no more interesting place in the world to meet characters than a movie set. If you have lost anybody anywhere and don
|
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
|
I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.
|
And I always had this idea for making a movie about a femme fatale, because I like these characters. They're a lot of fun, they're sexy, they're manipulative, they're dangerous.
|
I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not. If I could, be... a great athlete and make a million a year, be a wit, a born -- vivant and a lady killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist ... and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably, at the outset of life. Be alike possible for a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more of less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully and pick out on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failure are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs carrying shame and gladness with them.
|
wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.
|
It seems to have had an order, to have been composed by someone, and those events that were merely accidental when they happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. Who composed this plot? Just as your dreams are composed, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Just as the people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been the agent in the structuring of other lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, everything influencing and structuring everything else. It's as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all of the dream characters are dreaming too. And so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature...It is as though there were an intention behind it yet it is all by chance. None of us lives the life that he had intended.
|
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference...
|
My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.
|
There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the so...
|
The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.
|
Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.
|
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.
|
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the People, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free 'government' ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.
|
The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.
|
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
|
Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction. Ultimately people shape their own characters.
|
High aims form high characters, and great objects bring out great minds.
|
Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga -- stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.
|
Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;...
|
I came across awful characters when I got some kind of status and came to Hollywood. Then you have directors trying to sleep with you, assuming that you will do things because of the way you dress.
|
The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principle source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied without present condition, or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
|
Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.
|