Blog


About


Books

 Latest Post: Flash!

Agnostic
A Spirited Manifesto
Available April 4, 2016

   Who is the AT?   Books by LH
  • Agnostic

  • The First Muslim

  • After The Prophet

  • Jezebel

  • Mary

  • More from LH

     

Who Said It?

Posted August 25th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

“Isn’t there a convention that if you don’t know the author of a quote, you can always attribute it to Churchill?” one character asks another in Zia Haider Rahman’s novel ‘In The Light of What We Know.’

“I suppose you’re right,” the other replies.  “In fact, as Churchill himself said, the false attribution of epigrams is the friend of letters and the enemy of history.”

“Churchill said that?”

“No.”

churchill-382089Franz-Kafka

That’s just an amuse-bouche from Rahman’s novel, which I’ll write more about soon.  But it seems to me that the epigram convention could as well apply to Kafka as to Churchill.  I suspect this might be the case in the following quote invariably attributed to Prague’s ur-existentialist:

— “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

I love the mordant humor of that (and have never heard it attributed to Churchill.)   My problem with it is that I can’t figure out where it comes from.  Was it really Kafka?   Kafka fan sites (a Kafkaesque notion in itself) list hundreds of quotes, but few bother to source the quotes precisely, and even on those few, this particular one goes unsourced.   A friend says it sounds more like Oscar Wilde, and it does have that sardonic Wildean touch.

So herewith, an appeal:  if you know where Kafka said it (or Wilde, or even Churchill come to that), please do let me know, so that I can give credit where it’s indubitably due.

And talking of crediting quotes, I’m still casting my net for the source of this brilliant definition:

— “Forgiveness is abandoning all hope of a perfect past.”

At first blush, this sounds quite Wildean too, but it has a resonance — an afterlife in the mind — that speaks of deep sagacity, though the sage in question remains a mystery.   So again, if you know who said it (perhaps that should be written as whoseddit, as in whodunnit), do let me know.

In the meantime, here’s a sprinkling of well-sourced quotes that have been circling my head this past month:

— “I have decided to stick with love;  hate is too great a burden to bear.” — Martin Luther King

— “To be free of belief and unbelief is my religion.” — Omar Khayyam

— “We don’t even know for sure that our universe really had a beginning at all, as opposed to spending an eternity doing something we don’t understand.” — physicist Max Tegmark

— “I look forward to surviving.  If I don’t, remember that I wasn’t Hamas or a militant, nor was I used as a human shield.  I was at home.” — Mohammed Suliman, Gaza City

—  and again from Zia Haider Rahman:  “Listening is hard, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world.”

———————

lily tomlinAugust 26 update:

That quote on forgiveness?  Identified!

Many thanks to AT reader Nuzhat (see comments), who traced it to…  not Wilde, not Kafka, not even Churchill, but to a wonderful and totally unexpected source:  the wisdom of comedy in the form of Lily Tomlin!

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: agnosticism, art, existence | Tagged: Tags: Franz Kafka, Lily Tomlin, Martin Luther King, Max Tegmark, Mohammed Suliman, Omar Khayyam, Oscar Wilde, quotes, Winston Churchill, Zia Haider Rahman | 8 Comments
  1. Abdul Wadood says:
    August 25, 2014 at 12:35 pm

    a really sage-like post in itself.

  2. fatmakalkan says:
    August 25, 2014 at 2:18 pm

    Beautiful!
    I am not famous but I have one of my own:) that I like to share with you :
    ” Best way to safeguard a good deed, not to tell anyone.”

  3. Nuzhat says:
    August 25, 2014 at 8:22 pm

    How about: ” Love is a damaging mistake, and it’s accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion”, by Khalid Hosseini, in ‘A thousand splendid Suns’. A sure letdown to romantics!!
    Loved all your mentioned quotes, Lesley. Can be added to my collection. It’s a super topic of its own.
    Thanks.
    Nuzhat.

  4. Nuzhat says:
    August 25, 2014 at 8:58 pm

    Lesley, I hope my internet information on the quote, “forgiveness is abandoning……..”, is correct. It was Lily Tomlin, American actress and humorist, who said this famous line. You had this query in one of your previous blogs of 2010 too….
    Nuzhat

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 26, 2014 at 8:48 am

      Lily Tomlin?! Oh that’s both so unexpected and so wonderful. Thanks so much, Nuzhat — will check it out. And yes, I queried on this before but got no answer then. Maybe the I Ching is right, and perseverance is rewarded! — L.

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        August 26, 2014 at 8:54 am

        Yes, Lily Tomlin! I love it!
        Nuzhat, I am in your debt.

        • Nuzhat says:
          August 26, 2014 at 7:52 pm

          It’s mutual….a loyal fan, following you since I discovered you and your writings, books, talks…..keep going!

  5. paul hallam says:
    August 26, 2014 at 3:56 am

    As always, a beautiful and very funny post.

MLK’s Dream

Posted August 28th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

i-have-a-dream

It’s the 50th anniversary of that powerful, enduring speech, and somehow I want to cry.

There is so much dreaming still to be done.

And so much pressure to abandon those dreams.  To sleep so deep that we forget how to dream.  To wake with no awareness of ever having had one.

Easy to be cynical and say the obvious:  dreams aren’t reality.  But isn’t that just an excuse for inaction?  A different reality is not possible if you cannot imagine it.  If you cannot imagine peace, or friendship, or even simply absence of conflict, you will not act towards it.  You will be a passive bystander in your own life and that of the world around you.  You will accept the status quo, however bad it is.  Your lack of dreams will become your waking nightmare.

In June, I said that if we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so.  I stand by that.  I stand by the vital human ability to defy nightmare and to insist on dreams, on different possibilities.

Even as we know we will never fully achieve them, the very least we can do is try.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: existence, light | Tagged: Tags: "I have a dream", 50th anniversary, Martin Luther King | 6 Comments
  1. John Sterns says:
    August 28, 2013 at 4:16 pm

    Two quotes come to mind, first on the need to dream:

    “You got to have a dream,
    If you don’t have a dream,
    How you gonna have a dream come true?”

    Rodgers And Hammerstein, “Happy Talk”, South Pacific

    The other on making dreams a reality:

    “If you will it, it is not a dream.”

    Theodor Herzl

    We remember the dream articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not only because of its vision, but because of the will of Civil Rights activists to not accepts things as they were and make life better for all of us.

  2. Jerry M says:
    September 2, 2013 at 10:59 am

    It is too bad that he died when he did. He did achieve some success. I lived in Tennessee for 3 years and worked with a number of African Americans who came from the social class that created the civil rights movement (one of my best friends was a child of 2 educators from Mississippi). That generation got the vote and a good measure of civil equality, but those people were already middle class and college educated. In the 1960’s when unions were relatively strong it probably seemed that the ending of legal segregation was all that was needed.

    I don’t know if King saw the attacks on unions and workers rights as the coming phase of modern capitalism, but I am sure if he lived until the 1990’s he would have attacked it. Perhaps with his personality he might have succeeded.

    So, civil rights movement v1, successful, v2, not so much.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 6, 2013 at 5:39 pm

      I agree, I’m sure he would have. But with how much success remains, as you note, a question mark.

  3. Jerry M says:
    September 6, 2013 at 10:20 am

    I will post 2 quotes from John Singer Sargent about portraits;
    “A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.”

    “Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”

  4. Jerry M says:
    September 6, 2013 at 11:16 am

    sorry posted in wrong place, meant to post on the article about the woman’s portrait

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 6, 2013 at 5:37 pm

      Here: http://accidentaltheologist.com/2013/08/19/seeing-women/

Order the Book

Available online from:
  • Amazon.com
  • Barnes & Noble
  • IndieBound
  • Powell's
Or from your favorite bookseller.

Tag Cloud

absurd agnosticism art atheism Christianity ecology existence feminism fundamentalism Islam Judaism light Middle East sanity technology TED TALKS ugliness US politics war women

Recent Posts

  • Flash! September 1, 2019
  • “What’s Wrong With Dying?” February 9, 2017
  • The Poem That Stopped Me Crying December 30, 2016
  • Talking About Soul at TED December 5, 2016
  • ‘Healing’? No Way. November 10, 2016
  • Psychopath, Defined August 2, 2016
  • Lovely NYT Review of ‘Agnostic’! July 14, 2016
  • Playing With Stillness June 22, 2016
  • Inside Palestine June 20, 2016
  • Virtual Unreality June 6, 2016
  • The Free-Speech Challenge May 23, 2016
  • Category-Free April 20, 2016
  • Staring At The Void April 13, 2016
  • Sherlock And Me April 3, 2016
  • Hard-Wired? Really? March 22, 2016
  • A Quantum Novel March 9, 2016
  • This Pre-Order Thing March 4, 2016
  • The Agnostic Celebration February 29, 2016
  • The First Two Pages February 23, 2016
  • Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic” February 10, 2016
Skip to toolbar
  • About WordPress
    • WordPress.org
    • Documentation
    • Support Forums
    • Feedback