Tao Te Ching
Entertainment
If “The truth will set you free,” lies and deception will enslave you and when entertainment rules, lies become valued over truth. When fictional movies and TV shows compete with news programs, news programs become fictionalized. Smart phones, streamed music, movies, and omnipresent electronic connections enable constant entertainment while preventing any gaps, any contemplation, any time for reflection. As Neil Postman wrote, “There’s no business but show business.” In the West, one of the worst punishments is solitary confinement. In Tibet, people work hard for years to secure their families and make enough to support dark retreats, solitary meditations in sealed up caves that last many years.
Quotes (78)
“Those who live for pleasure alone will certainly fall like weak trees in a great wind.”
“Pleasure has no fellowship with virtue... of all the enemies that reason has, pleasure is the chief.”
“Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.”
“Pleasure for an hour, a bottle of wine; pleasure for a year, marriage; pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.”
“Americans don’t spend billions for entertainment. They spend it in search of entertainment.”
“What madness has seized you?... Everyone is dragged on by their favorite pleasure.
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“There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.”
“Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish… Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest… determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.”
“Pleasure is liking and loving. We never for a moment cease to seek it... That we are forever the servants of our likes and dislikes is entirely for the sake of pleasure and pain.”
“As there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none more lasting, none gentler or more faithful; none that accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety.”
“Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption. ”
“When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert one another with our monkey-tricks.”
“Nature has presented us with a large faculty of entertaining ourselves alone: and often calls us to it, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but chiefly and mostly to ourselves.”
“Truth is as naked and open daylight that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure”
“I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking: I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment.”
“Leave off hungry. One ought to remove even the bowl of nectar from the lips… Little and good is twice good… Too much pleasure is always dangerous.”
“If you enter by the gate of pleasure, you leave by the door of sorrow.”
“Drinking and gambling are curses that lessen any man’s mind and strength and waste his substance.”
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
“But pleasures are like poppies spread— You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river— A moment white—then melts forever.”
“And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.”
“When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.”
“Philistines, people who are always seriously occupied with realities which are no realities, live without mental needs or intellectual pleasure and think of oysters and champagne as the height of existence. If the luxuries of life are heaped upon them, they will inevitably be bored and seek out remedies like balls, the theater, parties, cards, gambling, horses, women, drinking, traveling and will create a dull, dry kind of life similar to animals.”
“Let us have Wine and Women, Mirth and Laughter
Sermons and soda-water the day after.”
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
“All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
“We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences”
“Any man who is attached to things of this world is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes of his own passions.”
“The true spirit of delight, the exultation—the sense of being more than Man—is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
“To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.”
“Journalism largely consists in saying, "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
“Civilization begins at the moment sport begins. As long as the struggles for preservation—to protect itself from its enemies, maintain itself upon the surface of the earth—civilization cannot be born. It is born the moment that life satisfies its primary needs and begins to enjoy a little leisure.”
“the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master... murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral”
“We are choked with news, and starved of history... we give too much time to news about the transient present too little to the living past.”
“Radio is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome”
“A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now… but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera… will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.”
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
“You cannot see the Milky Way in New York City any more ... We risk the loss of our sensual perception. And if you lose those, naturally, you try to compensate by other stimulations, by very loud noises, or by bright lights or drugs.”
“Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary”
“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”
“While you sit watching pictures on your color TV set, I stand gazing at ripples in a moonlit pond, thanking the gods for not interrupting with commercials.”
“Mountain climbing, going to the beach, listening to birds singing—all these seem to be ways of capturing a bit of nature. But no matter how many such recreations one gathers together, they do not add up to a true understanding of nature.”
“we are most happy when good things are expected to happen, not when they are happening. We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.”
“Boredom is another form of desire– 'I want something to entertain me.' But if we can stay unattached to the thinking, and just experience the pain or boredom, something bigger begins to surround it.”
“He comes to believe that political power... is the result of access to the television screen... what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.”
“Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.”
“entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages… the contemporary equivalent of the Roman ‘games of the circus’ that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that preserves the status quo inequality”
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”
“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters worry less about the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. What is and what is not show business becomes harder and harder to see… ‘There’s No Business But Show Business.’”
“When news is packaged as entertainment, the inevitable result is disinformation—misleading, misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, superficial information. We begin to take ignorance as knowledge.”
“Mindfulness is the ground; refraining is the path... not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on.”
“People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.”
“As long as you are entertained, you are fascinated by what's happening rather than relating to what you have experienced, the facts of the scientific approach to life.”
“A warrior doesn’t need color television or video games… doesn’t need to read comic books… the world of entertainment doesn’t arise.”
“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, and you think you're so clever and classless and free… A working class hero is something to be.”
“Songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.”
“Blow up your TV...throw away your paper...move to the country and build you a home. Plant a little garden...eat a lot of peaches...try and find Jesus on your own.”
“Pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.”
“Americans may be under-educated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television... You can tell lies to them and they'll never know.”
“What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their own damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being open-minded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to.”
“Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music combined.”
“The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'
'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.
'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.'”
“Aldous Huxley predicted, ‘What we love will ruin us’ and described a human race destroyed by ignorance, lust for constant entertainment, technology, and too many goods.”
“Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war. And if you think you can press some delete button and wipe out all trace of Hollywood from your subconscious and your limbic system, you are deluding yourself.”
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