#able

As a member of the Protestant British squirearchy ruling Ireland, he was touchy about his Irish origins. When in later life an enthusiastic Gael commended him as a famous Irishman, he replied "A man can be born in a stable, and yet not be an animal. ↗

— Arthur Wellesley Wellington

#famous #irish #stable #life

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you. ↗

— Sonya Hartnett

#miserable #life

That was, in fact, my life. A whole series of reasonable lies. ↗

— Stacey Kade

#reasonable-lies #life

It gave him the same odd sense of dislocation, though; that sense of losing some valuable part of himself that could not survive the passage back to daily life. Each time, the passage became more difficult. ↗

— Diana Gabaldon

#life

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life? ↗

— W.G. Sebald

#life #meaning #understanding #work #writing

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful ↗

— Stephen King

#good #life #useful #life

If you never try, you'll never know what you are capable of. ↗

— John Barrow

#know #never #try #you

In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fable #jesus #myth #skepticism #life

Take it for all in all, a representative gathering of Twing life and thought. The Nibs were whispering in a pleased manner to each other, the Lower Middles were sitting up very straight, as if they'd been bleached, and the Tough Eggs whiled away the time by cracking nuts and exchanging low rustic wheezes. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#jeeves #life

I like the discipline of well-cut, impeccable clothes. I think it's a very healthy discipline. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#discipline #healthy #i #i think #impeccable