That glittering hope is immemorial and beckons many men to their undoing.
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
One of the things that has always been my undoing in politics is my readiness to do whatever job has to be done.
Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing.
It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.
You can't undo the past. . . but you can certainly not repeat it.
Crying wolf may have been the boy's undoing, but the true irony was that the wolves were always lurking nearby.
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.
Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be. The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness.
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing.
Pull a string, a puppet moves. . . each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha. . . can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.
Peace comes not from doing, but from undoing; not from getting, but from letting go.
Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change
Beware of your habits. The better they are the more surely they will be your undoing.
They tried to be too clever---and that was their undoing.
For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.
