#ass

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body. ↗

— Richard Selzer

#medical #medicine #passion #pathology #science

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#men

We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses. ↗

— Italo Calvino

#nature #passion-unleashed #nature

Does affirmative action place minority students in colleges where they're likely to fail while depriving other applicants of the chance to attend the most challenging schools where they are capable of succeeding? Does rent control drive up the cost of housing, depriving property owners of the same opportunity to profit as any other investor while driving down the quality and quantity of the housing stock? Do minimum wage laws reduce the number of entry-level jobs, making it harder to escape from poverty? Because compassion, by its nature, subordinates doing good to feeling good, these are questions the warm-hearted rarely pursue. ↗

— William Voegeli

#moral-psychology #poverty #nature

Jessica guffawed. “Well, almost every need. It will be every need when we walk in the door and they have gorgeous men waiting for us as well.” “Nope, not happening.” Cassandra took a chip, dipped it in the salsa,and popped it in her mouth. “Not interested in a relationship. Men are high maintenance, and relationships only bring pain.” Jessica flicked a chip across the table at her and sat back in her chair. Her expression became sober as she looked at her best friend. “Seriously Cassie, you don’t believe that. ↗

— Cecilia Aubrey

#men

What interests me is to set up what you might call the rapport de grand écart - the most unexpected relationship possible between the things I want to speak about, because there is a certain difficulty in establishing relationships in just that way, and in that difficulty there is an interest, and in that interest there is a certain tension and for me that tension is a lot more important than the stable equilibrium of harmony, which doesn't interest me at all. Reality must be torn apart in every sense of the word. What people forget is that everything is unique. Nature never produces the same thing twice. Hence my stress on seeking the rapport de grand écart: a small head on a large body; a large head on a small body. I want to draw the mind in the direction it's not used to and wake it up. I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn't have discovered without me. That's why I stress the dissimilarity, for example, between the left eye and the right eye. A painter shouldn't make them so similar. They're just not that way. So my purpose is to set things in movement, to provoke this movement by contradictory tensions, opposing forces, and in that tension or opposition, to find the moment which seems the most interesting to me. ↗

— Françoise Gilot

#reality-of-a-painting #nature

I think I'd convinced myself that all long-term relationships end up that way; I really thought I had no right to expect more. ↗

— Catherine Sanderson

#settling-for-second-best #relationship

They don’t teach kidnapping at Eton, dad ↗

— Gwenn Wright

#dysfunctional-relationship #peter-strauss #von-strassenberg-saga #vssaga #ya

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#extremism #opinion #opinions #passion #rationalism

I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#his-dark-materials #philip-pullman #religion