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So, Anyway...
John Cleese
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are, in some mysterious way, short of time.”
“Cats are very intelligent at all the things that cats need to be intelligent about.”
“Research has shown that constant relocation in childhood is often associated with creativity. It seems that the creative impulse is sparked by the need to reconcile contrasting views of the world. If you move home, you start living a slightly different life, so you compare it with your previous life, note the divergences and the similarities, see what you like better and what you miss, and as you do so, your mind becomes more flexible and capable of combining thoughts and ideas in new and fresh ways.”
“I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn’t know the difference between being solemn and being serious.”
“His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he’d once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.”
“So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony. Add to these two gifts the well-established fact that many of the world’s greatest geniuses, both artistic and scientific, have been the product of serious maternal deprivation, and I am forced to the conclusion that if only my mother had been just a little more emotionally inadequate, I could have been HUGE.”
“Self-confidence seemed to me more mimicry than anything else and I suggested visiting Clifton Zoo to watch the leaders in a group of baboons, and learn from them: make your gestures slow and deliberate; cultivate a deeper voice; appear casual at all times; eschew all rapid movements. That was all you had to do to look confident.”
“Mother told me once that some Westonians privately criticised Dad for retreating so soon. They apparently felt it would have been more dignified to have waited a week or so before running away. I think this view misses the essential point of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, “Let’s run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.”
“Genuinely good manners are, after all, essentially a way of moderating one’s own egotism, often in the service of considering the egos of others. Even if it’s done mainly for show, it’s still a start.”
“True, there was a vague assumption that doing so would bring me closer to God, but then who was God when he was at home? And why did he keep losing it with his chosen people, when he could easily have changed his mind, and picked a more co-operative bunch?”
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