Robert Jacoby > Robert's Quotes

“Perceptive observers saw civilization thinned to a mere veneer, with barbarism surging just beneath the surface, straining for release.”
― Bruce Brander, Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization

“Everyone uses their own dictionary.”
― Robert Jacoby, There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes

“The way I always kind of look at it: everything’s important and nothing’s important. If you’re gonna have a drama, have it over something that’s worth the time. Some people take it more seriously than others, like a Lowell. But we all end up the same.”
― Robert Jacoby, Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying: 40 Years of High Seas Travels and Lowbrow Tales

“The human race puzzles me, with striving for freedom, and then basically just giving it away.”
― Robert Jacoby, Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying: 40 Years of High Seas Travels and Lowbrow Tales

“An interesting captain on there, McNamara. Th e United States Lines had three captains. Every company had their captains that were notorious, and U.S. Lines had McNamara. Later on, McNamara, he dies, and the Wilmington Union Hall for Masters, Mates and Pilots—cuz he was captain, he would come out of that hall—they had a party
when he died. Baked a cake.
It wasn’t every day you got to lose one like him.
Some people took this more seriously than others is the only way I can phrase this.”
― Robert Jacoby, Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying: 40 Years of High Seas Travels and Lowbrow Tales

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Reverence for Life: The Words of Albert Schweitzer

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
― Mark Twain

“What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months
on six lines of poetry?”
― Lorine Niedecker

“Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West