Monday, November 08, 2010

Bon mot for the week

"The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings."


Henri Frédéric Amiel  (1821-1881)

2 comments:

JES said...

I am always surprised by how few people seem to appreciate this truth. Maybe I've just been lucky, but the people I know who have rich inner lives are pretty much always the people I call on in desperate, advice-needing straits. All that exercise inside their own heads -- moving the furniture around, contemplating the stuff hanging on the walls, browsing the library -- seems to equip them much better for dealing with crises (beyond the "Which screwdriver should I use?" level, I mean).

Plus, it's so much more fun.

Froog said...

Shane MacGowan of The Pogues once asserted that drunks tended to be more intelligent than other people "who never explore the insides of their heads like a drunk does".