Michael Foley Quotes

#1. As royalty, celebrities and the rich have always known, a smile is the most subtle and satisfying way of shitting on the inferior.

Michael Foley

#2. In sex women are largely guided by their sensible bodies but men are driven crazy by their feverish minds. Men love to think and talk about sex; women enjoy it while it lasts, if they can, and have little interest in pre-match build-up or post-match analysis.

Michael Foley

#3. And a sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.

Michael Foley

#4. The perfect servant is the one who attends to all the master's whims - anyone can do that - but the one who anticipates the whims.

Michael Foley

#5. However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.

Michael Foley

#6. The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.

Michael Foley

#7. Snobbery management is as difficult and necessary as anger management.

Michael Foley

#8. Desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled

Michael Foley

#9. It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.

Michael Foley

#10. Proust is famous for his rhapsodies on hawthorns but his book has only three of these, whereas there are thirteen scenes in brothels, one especially detailed episode running to more than forty pages. Few critics mention the brothels but they are more fun than the hawthorns.

Michael Foley

#11. After a lifetime of engaging in long, passionate discussions I have come to the conclusion that it is a waste of time trying to convince anyone of anything.

Michael Foley

#12. Day offers two equally necessary sacraments - the benediction of morning and the absolution of dusk. In the morning coffee blesses and in the evening wine absolves.

Michael Foley

#13. Only a determined and resourceful scholar could establish manuscript precedence - but in the race to masturbate on a printed page Proust definitely came first.

Michael Foley

#14. 94 per cent of us think we do above-average work.

Michael Foley

#15. Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.

Michael Foley

#16. But there is a compelling reason to develop a personal strategy for living. Rejecting issues, which often feels liberating, is actually enslavement. Those who do not produce their own solutions must be using someone else's. As Nietzsche warned 'he who cannot obey himself will be commanded'.

Michael Foley

#17. The drive to make everything lightweight is depriving us of the the deep reassurance of heft.

Michael Foley

#18. It may well be that an analysis of figures would reveal a law - the duration of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. Or, to put it another way, any union celebrated with personalized toasting flutes is doomed.

Michael Foley

#19. Snatch religion back from the clerics and literature from the critics.

Michael Foley

#20. To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life.

Michael Foley

#21. The happiness state, when examined more closely, turns out not to be a point but a range, with contentment at the bottom and exaltation at the top ... there are probably as many forms of happiness as there are of depression.

Michael Foley