#Quote
More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
When all else fails, philosophize.
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.
