One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.
behaviour life politeness victory wisdom
But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.
art behaviour philosophy psychiatry religion thought
Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy..
behaviour beliefs conditioning cultural-conditioning culture eduction inspiring-quotes life-stories mindset rasheed-ogunlaru-quotes stories-life upbringing
What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.
behaviour crazy learning life work
At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.
behaviour religion
Sam Littleton was a beautiful woman who would try to play women's games. That meant that if he asked her if she was upset with him about something, she would do what women all do at such times: She would deny that anything was wrong, then continue acting as if something was wrong, in hopes that he would do what men always do at such times -beg for an explanation, agonise over the answer, ask for hints, and agonise a little more.
behaviour men women
Men don't change. They just learn to disguise the lack of change.
behaviour humanity
We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.
behaviour birds fish humans intelligence morally-valuable species
A Corrupt is Correct for a Corrupt.
behaviour correct corrupt inspirational life mind-power mind-set thinking
Our life stories are largely constructed and without mindfulness can prove destructive.
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