#ass

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing? ↗

— Sebastian Faulks

#life

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#passivity #writer #writing #life

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings? ↗

— Charles de Secondat

#anything #assert #behold #beings #blind

The first responsibility of the Muslim is as teacher. That is his job, to teach. His first school, his first classroom is within the household. His first student is himself. He masters himself and then he begins to convey the knowledge that he has acquired to the family. The people who are closest to him. ↗

— H. Rap Brown

#begins #classroom #closest #convey #family

You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK. Life is a box of chocolates. I suppose you could call it a philosophy. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#chocolate #life #philosophy #truth #life

We used numbers and rigid systems to fit time into containers we could understand. But like Nexa said, it was immeasurable. A fluid river no logical structure could hold. A moment could have the power of years. And years could pass in a moment. The only thing that forever remained true about time was it never stopped moving forward. ↗

— Emma Raveling

#time #time-passing #life

Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken. ↗

— Alan Sillitoe

#life-lessons #reflection #working-class #life

Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life---which is fundamentally dependent on light---to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#life

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest. ↗

— Lyman Abbott

#essence #faculty #highest #lord #man

How good life is when one does something good and just! ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#goodness #justice #kindness #life