Flaubert: - What would I learn from those wonderful newspapers you so want me to take each morning, with my bread and butter and cup of coffee? Why should I care what they have to say? I have very little curiosity about the news, politics bores me to death, and the literary articles stink. To me it's all stupid-making and irritating...Yes, newspapers disgust me profoundly -- I mean the ephemeral, things of the moment, what is important today and won't be tomorrow.
Thoreau: - If words are invented to conceal thought, I think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention.
- To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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