#ali

To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself. ↗

— Pascal Mercier

#courage #dignity #honesty #personality #self-awareness

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#goodness #integrity #morality #death

They walked across 15th Street to the Madison Hotel's Montpelier Room, an opulent French restaurant. Bradlee asked for a corner table, and began the conversation. 'You'd better bring me up to date because...' He turned to order lunch in perfect French, and then turned back to Woodward. '...our cocks are on the chopping block now and I just want to know a little bit more about this. ↗

— Carl Bernstein

#dating

We have better relationships with those who truly seek us rather than those sitting on the couch watching us move mountains trying to prove ourselves. ↗

— Criss Jami

#courtship #dating #friend #friends #friendship

Everything was gone, the garden of wind and light, the Chrysalis, the Mother and her sister-crones, the rowan tree, everything. I was in a grove–no, it was a triad of trees: apple, oak, hazel. And at my feet something that smacked of familiar miens, a stone half buried in a pitch of heather. A stone bearing my name and a date I could hardly remember. A moment passed, another and in those moments I stood numb with gluey feet at the foot of my own grave. For the first time since I’d come to the Faeran Valley, I was alone. And the silence was deafening ↗

— Debi Cimo

#grave #moment #silence #dating

There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#remembrance #death

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken? ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#immortality #remembrance #death

I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds you together when nothing else can. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#immortality #music #power-of-music #strength #time

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood? ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#death #life #pessimism #death

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#agnosticism #mortality #religion #death