destructive Quotes

“I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.”

“Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That’s original sin.”

“When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of the strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance.”

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

“Maybe it’s because Jesse isn’t all that different from me, choosing fire as his medium, needing to know that he could command at least one uncontrollable thing.”

“During our next outing, Marley surgically removed the woofer cone from the same speaker. The speaker wasn’t knocked over or in any way amiss; the paper cone was simply gone, as if someone had sliced it out with a razor blade. Eventually he got around to doing the same to the other speaker. Another time, we came home to find that our four-legged footstool was now three-legged, and there was no sign whatsoever—not a single splinter—of the missing limb.”

“For companies that operate like a family: Sometimes the commitment to being a family gets interpreted in two destructive ways that often remain unspoken. The first one is that ‘we will put up with you no matter how you perform, and you will always have a place here.’ Second, in these companies, it can also be implied that ‘if you give yourself to us, we will take care of you, almost for life.‘”

“Your business and your life will change when you really, really get it that some people are not going to change, no matter what you do, and that still others have a vested interest in being destructive.”

“Secrets tear you apart.”

“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.”

“Children believe and internalize what their parents say about them. It is sadistic and destructive for a parent to make repetitive jokes at the expense of a vulnerable child. Phil was constantly being humiliated and picked on.”