DO YOU ALSO LOVE INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES?

Then May has bad news for you

It's a blogger trick. No time or inspiration to take a great photo? Then you write an inspirational quote in your prettiest handwriting and you can roll out the carpet for all the likers. Women love quotes.

I have a love-hate relationship with them. I can really enjoy some (like the quotes on Amayzine.com for example), especially when they are funny. But as a quote, you have to be careful if you suddenly end up on a wooden Piet Hein Eek-like board in a home store. Then you are quite over the hill as an inspirational quote.

A sentence can be as inspiring as it wants, but when cast in a list in a prominent place, I quickly find it a bit bourgeois. Kluun had written ‘Carpe Fucking Diem’ large on his wall. I don't know, I just find that a bit... well, childish? But when Josselin writes something meaningful in her fabulous handwriting, it gets a place of honor in my home.

“Kluun had written ‘Carpe Fucking Diem’ large on his wall”

Apparently there is a large market for quotes, because people devour them. This prompted the University of Ontario to conduct research into the intelligence of quote consumers. They first showed their test group randomly assembled sentences. They had scraped together sentences from all kinds of quotes.

Then they showed the test panel ‘real’ quotes from, for example, Gandhi. It turned out that quote consumers quickly find it acceptable if it is semantically somewhat correct. ‘Pseudo profound bullshit’ did well with the test group. That didn't bode well for us quote lovers, because there is a clear correlation between intellectual level and the need for quotes.

Oh well, as long as you walk around those signs at Loods 5, I wouldn't attach too much value to it. Those research types have to keep busy, just think about it.