#at

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#life-experience #self-determination #experience

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#empowerment #flaws #freedom #gender #ideal-woman

I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions. ↗

— George Carlin

#freedom-of-thought #humor #patriotism #freedom

I thought of love as a game. It is not a game. It is more serious than death. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#death

I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial. ↗

— Mark Galli

#church #denial #praise-and-worship #death

We love because we can lose. If there was no threat of separation, no death to shake us to our core, we probably wouldn't love much at all. ↗

— Donna Lynn Hope

#love #separation #death

I don’t even like cemeteries. Morgues, either, nor anatomy museums, undertakers’ parlors, funeral chapels, or any of those places where the world of the living sparks against the world of the dead, and a spot of burned out time fades, diffuse in an ocean of timelessness. ↗

— Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

#fiction-novel #death

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#christianity #prologue #death

My civil rights will not be trampled, and I say this not for me but for my children, and all those who yearn to breathe free. Those who make your Apple products at Foxxcon, those who languish in prisons in Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela. Those homosexuals who are stoned to death in the streets of Egypt or Iran, while our so-called civil rights leaders hold coffee klatches with third graders in the White House. ↗

— Glenn Beck

#death

Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal. How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and then the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time. In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#spirituality #death