More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
lack of scrotonin impaired one’s capacity to concentrate at work, to sleep, to eat and to enjoy life’s pleasures. When this substance was completely absent, the person experienced despair, pessimism, a sense of futility, terrible tiredness, anxiety, difficulties in making decisions, and would end up sinking into permanent gloom, which would lead either to complete apathy or to suicide.
people never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.
Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.’
the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what you encounter. It is you I will teach.”
Stop thinking all the time that you’re in the way, that you’re bothering the person next to you. If people don’t like it, they can complain. And if they don’t have the courage to complain, that’s their problem.’
You have two choices: to control your mind or to let your mind control you.
stay mad, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention.
What was God? What was salvation if, that is, the world needed saving? Nothing. If everyone there – and outside Villete too – just lived their lives and let others do the same, God would be in every moment, in every grain of mustard, in the fragment of cloud that is there and then gone the following moment. God was there and yet people believed they still had to go on looking, because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.
normality is merely a matter of consensus, that is, a lot of people think something is right, and so that thing becomes right. ‘Some things are governed by common sense: putting buttons on the front of a shirt is a matter of logic, since it would be very difficult to button them up at the side, and impossible if they were at the back. ‘Other things, however, become fixed because more and more people believe that’s the way they should be.
“Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.”
