#at

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication ↗

— Leonardo da Vinci

#simplicity #sophistication #simplicity

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#the-great-gatsby #simplicity

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#childishness #maturity #desire

Peeta's awake already, sitting on the side of the bed, looking bewildered as the trio of doctors reassure him, flash lights in his eyes, checks his pules. I'm disappointed that mine was not the first face he saw when he woke up, but he sees it now. His features registrer disbelief and something more intense that I can't quite place. Desire? Desperation? Surely both, for he sweeps the doctors aside, leaps to his feets and moves towards me. I run to meet him, my arms extended to embrace him. His hands are reaching for mine too, to caress my face, I think. My lips are forming his name when his fingers lock around my throat. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#katniss #meeting #mockingjay #peeta #suffocate

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness. ↗

— Thornton Wilder

#love #education

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#nations #politics #creation

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#average #mediocrity #creation

All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire. ↗

— Rumi

#desire

Perfect! Now we're being chased by hoards of monkeys! Perhaps you would care to name their species as we're attacked, just so I can appreciate the special traits of said monkey as it kills me!" "At least when the monkeys are harassing you, you dont have any time to harass me! ↗

— Colleen Houck

#sarcastic #appreciation

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. ↗

— Sam Harris

#faith