Quotes Tagged "it-is-what-it-is"

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others! He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs, And isn’t cured from the outside, Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink, Or a trunk not having iron bands! There being injustice is like there being death.

I saw that there is no Nature, That Nature doesn’t exist, That there are hills, valleys, plains, That there are trees, flowers, weeds, That there are rivers and stones, But there is not a whole these belong to, That a real and true wholeness Is a sickness of our ideas.

I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either. Nobody goes faster than the legs they have. If where I want to go is far away, I’m not there in an instant. (6/20/1919)

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside. But what is it, a row of trees? It’s just trees. Row and the plural trees aren’t things, they’re names.

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff, And his sheep are straying on the hillside, And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much. No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again. Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him. No one had loved him, in the end. When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything: The great valleys full of the same green as always, The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling, All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present. (And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs) And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest. (7/10/1930)

Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens . Do nothing and everything explodes.

It is what it is because you allowed it to be so.

On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nothing can better defend us than nature itself, which has let certain flowers and leaves grow in a particular color and shape. People who do not find them beneficial, suitable for their special needs, which cannot be known, can easily walk right by them. But they cannot demand that the flowers and leaves be colored and cut in another way.

When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.

It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.

The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone.

Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.