Sudha Murty · 188 pages
Rating: (3.2K votes)
“Many a times there is no perfect solution for a given problem. No solution is also a solution. Everything depends upon how you look at it. We make judgements on others depending upon what we think of them.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
“You should not be so sensitive. Sensitive people suffer a lot in life.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
“There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness is boring, whereas in solitude you can inspect and examine your deeds and your thoughts.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
“I knew then that to come up in life you require talent, hard work, aggression and connections.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
“Men can do certain things well and women other things. Men and women are complementary to each other. One need not prove one’s strength.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
“it is not the institution, ultimately it is you and you alone who can change your life by hard work.’ Probably he was not aware that he was following the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Your best friend is yourself and your worst enemy is yourself.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
“Advertising,” he wrote, “now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties
“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.
Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops fro ourselves. We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.
Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member of our own species unique. Everyone is one in 3 billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing.”
― Lewis Thomas, quote from The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
“We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.”
― Tony Judt, quote from Ill Fares the Land
“The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—
is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the
friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and
all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties
you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no
human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with
heaven, if Christ were not there? ”
― John Piper, quote from God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself
“Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.”
― Ian McDonald, quote from The Dervish House
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