Quote

The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Poor
Insisted
Spirit
Caution
Better
Identical
Thing
Morality
Made
Essence
World
Choose
Position
Knew
Perilous

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
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Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
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If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
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A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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