novelty

I'm old, but I'm not good enough to be jaded.

To seek contentment is to release the novelty that lies within monotony

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience__uying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello__ecome new all over again.

Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.

Novelty is the fuel on which the imagination runs.

No other species flees from boredom with as much urgency as we do. We are far more eager to do brain work than we are to do physical labor.

As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.

Some do not want to create rich experiences for others, others lack the ability to do so, but most just want to experience being rich, with little to no other experience.

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

Our brains resist change, they rail against it, our amygdala will always want the safe bet. But are the obstacles truly insurmountable? Is it a brick wall? Or is it a sliding door, which, once you decide to approach it, begins to swish open? Because even though our brains prefer safety in the short run, in the long run they crave meaning, challenge, and novelty.

Time limits tend to turn everything predictable and mundane into a novelty.

Know the word of God not in order that by doing so you might be saved; know it rather so that unlike the many you are not easily deceived. You may find that, evidently, a great many of the so-called novel ideas of the present were made without a clue that 'God', if you will, already laid profound discourse on or against them ages ago: no man has gone against God in such a way that God, from the beginning, did not already expect him to. Then, insofar as this, you will remain clear in that it is not at all that the Christian should be against newness; quite the opposite really - for a major point of Christianity is about one constantly being made new in Christ - it is only that many people are not actually bringing true newness to the table, and this is precisely because they do not first apply (or let alone even know) the wisdom of old.

Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn't a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.

All European writers are __laves of their baptism,_ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the __ouveau roman_: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.

There__ nothing new. The novelty lies in being yourself.

And we were in our thirties. Well into the Age of Boredom, when nothing is new. Now, I__ not being self-pitying; it__ simply true. Newness, or whatever you want to call it, becomes a very scarce commodity after thirty. I think that__ unfair. If I were in charge of the human life span, I__ make sure to budget newness much more selectively, to ration it out. As it is now, it__ almost used up in the first three years of life. By then you__e seen for the first time, tasted for the first time, held something for the first time. Learned to walk, talk, go to the bathroom. What have you got to look forward to that can compare with that? Sure, there__ school. Making friends. Falling in love. Learning to drive. Sex. Learning to trade. That has to carry you for the next twenty-five years. But after that? What__ the new excitement? Mastering your home computer? Figuring out how to work CompuServe? __ow, if it were up to me, I__ parcel out. So that, say, at thirty-five we just learned how to go on the potty. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment! They__ have office parties. "Did you hear? The vice president in charge of overseas development just went a whole week without his diaper. We__e buying him a gift." It__ be beautiful.

A new man is like a new toy. Fresh and interesting. Almost intriguing. It's like when you get a new car. Everything is different. The smell, the sound of the horn and seats, and it even ride good for a while. That's what a man is like to me.