125 Quotes About Objects

The object of your desire is not an object.

I’m relieved to seethat even brilliant physicists make mistakes.”Kohler looked over. “What do you mean?”“Whoever wrote that note made a mistake. That column isn’t Ionic. Ionic columns are uniform in width. That one’s tapered. It’s Doric—the Greek counterpart. A common mistake.”Kohler did not smile. “The author meant it as a joke, Mr. Langdon. Ionic means containing ions—electrically charged particles. Most objects contain them.

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature.

However completely people might fulfil themselves in other spheres, if they don’t possess this understanding between their hands and material objects, they can never have more than an incomplete understanding of the world.

What really lies beneath our feet at each moment is not a usefulness, but an inaccessible netherworld that we can use because it is there. It is the Empire of the Capital X.

When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction

Thus I am in Holland, the kingdom of things, great principality of objects. In Dutch, schoen means beautiful and at the same time clean, as if neatness was raised to the dignity of a virtue.

If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.