Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderQuote

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Ellen Parr, 1980; often credited to Dorothy Parker

LiteratureMind

The story behind the card

The saying is often credited to Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), the New York writer famous for her sharp wit, but it appears nowhere in her work. Its earliest known printing is in the 'Quotable Quotes' column of Reader's Digest in December 1980, credited to Ellen Parr, about whom almost nothing is known. Quote Investigator, a researcher who traces sayings to their first appearance, thinks the mix-up began around 1996, when the two names sat side by side in an alphabetical list of quotations.

Türkçe oku
Can sıkıntısının çaresi meraktır. Merakın ise çaresi yoktur.
Ellen Parr, 1980; çoğu zaman Dorothy Parker'a mal edilir

Söz çoğu zaman keskin esprileriyle ünlü New Yorklu yazar Dorothy Parker'a (1893–1967) mal edilir; ama onun yazılarının hiçbirinde geçmez. Bilinen en eski basımı, Reader's Digest dergisinin Aralık 1980 sayısındaki “Quotable Quotes” köşesindedir ve Ellen Parr adıyla yayımlanmıştır. Parr hakkında neredeyse hiçbir şey bilinmiyor. Sözlerin ilk kaynağını araştıran Quote Investigator'a göre karışıklık büyük olasılıkla 1996 dolaylarında, iki adın alfabetik bir alıntı listesinde yan yana düşmesiyle başladı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Dorothy Parker
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLiterature

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Kafka wrote this on 27 January 1904, aged twenty, to his schoolfriend Oskar Pollak, who became an art historian and was killed in 1915 on the Italian front in the First World War. Kafka was then a law student in Prague; his first book would not appear for another eight years. The letter sets out an early, uncompromising view of what literature should do: not comfort a reader, but shake one, the way a real loss would.

Franz KafkaRead card
WonderMind

The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about a music teacher he called Dr P, whose eyes worked well but who could not recognise faces or everyday objects by sight. Leaving an appointment, Dr P reached for his hat and took hold of his wife's head instead. The scene gave Sacks's 1985 book its title.

The book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of Sacks's case histories. He used Dr P to explain visual agnosia, a rare condition in which the eyes work normally but the brain cannot link what is seen to what it is. Handed a rose, Dr P described its red, folded shape and green stem in careful detail without realising it was a flower, until he smelled it. Sacks suspected a tumour or a degenerative disease in the visual areas at the back of the brain, which connect sight to memory; the cause was never confirmed. Dr P kept teaching music to the end of his life. He got through daily routines such as dressing and eating by singing his way through them: music still made sense to him when what he saw did not.

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a HatRead card
StillnessLiterature

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a French doctor who spent four years as an army surgeon in the First World War and won the Prix Goncourt, France's best-known literary prize, in 1918. He wrote La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain) during the war. Shortly before this line he recalls that the war let him see his child only seven times, each time barely recognising him; now he keeps seven images of him. Our feelings, he adds, take their true colour only later, like prints in a photographer's gold bath.

Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain (1919)Read card
StillnessLiterature

Do not trust your memory. It is a net full of holes. The most beautiful prizes slip through it.

From La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain, 1919), which the French writer Georges Duhamel wrote while serving as an army surgeon in the First World War. In a chapter on sharing one's discoveries with others, he recalls a friend who said almost every day that he had had a beautiful thought that morning and lost it. So keep a small notebook, Duhamel advises: the soul is a rushing river carrying mud, grass, flowers and gold, and the nuggets must be set aside before the current takes them.

Georges DuhamelRead card
DriveLiterature

For every dark night, there's a brighter day.

The line is widely credited to Tupac Shakur (1971–1996), the American rapper, actor and poet who remains one of hip-hop's most influential voices. It circulates on posters and in speeches under his name, but nobody has tied it to a particular song, interview or poem. The idea does fit his work: The Rose That Grew from Concrete, a collection of his poems published in 1999, three years after his death, keeps returning to hope that survives hard beginnings.

Widely attributed to Tupac ShakurRead card
Next card in the archiveThe Great Library of Alexandria did not burn down in a single night. It faded over centuries of neglect and lost funding.Read next →