pretentiousness

don__ be like so many writers,don__ be like so many thousands ofpeople who call themselves writers,don__ be dull and boring andpretentious, don__ be consumed with self-love.the libraries of the world haveyawned themselves tosleepover your kind.don__ add to that.don__ do it.

Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful.

I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.

Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.

Never trust someone that claims they care nothing of what society thinks of them. Instead of conquering obstacles, they simply pretend they don't exist.

The hope is indeed that some will experience and believe: The purpose of a number of spiritual gurus is to demonstrate to God-fearing men faux spirituality.

We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses.

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

I'm tired of 'pretentious' just being used as an excuse to dismiss anything that fucking expects you to have a brain.

July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my __areer_ (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn__ seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about __anting to do,_ I actually did in the four or five years that followed.

A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know.

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays_

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

You shattered the remainder of my heart, yet you expect me to be okay with it day after day.