#bit

There are always a few, Claire, who like being told what to do instead of being required to think. And those are the ones you should fear. That goes equally for humans, I'm afraid. Critical thinking has become a sadly rare skill these days. ↗

— Rachel Caine

#freedom #morganville-vampires #myrnin #rachel-caine #thinking

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. ↗

— Graham Greene

#beginning #creative-process #end #storytelling #writing

Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise. ↗

— Anthony de Mello

#bitterness #dying #harmony #spirituality #truth

If it's IN you to climb you must -- there are those who MUST lift their eyes to the hills -- they can't breathe properly in the valleys. ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#ambition

Luck is a word the bitter teach to the ignorant. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#ignorant #life #luck #motivational #success

An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought. ↗

— John Dewey

#empiricism #habit #pragmatism #experience

When life backs you into a corner and offers you no escape, when your friends, your lover, and your family abandon you, when you're at the end of your rope, panicked, alone, and losing your mind, you know you'd give anything to make your problems go away. Then, desperate and eager, you will come to Unicorn Lane, seeking salvation in its magics and secrets. You'll do anything, pay any price. Unicorn Lane will take you in, shroud you in its power, fix your problems, and exact its price. And then you will learn what 'anything' really means. ↗

— Ilona Andrews

#ilona-andrews #kate #kate-daniels #magic-bites #unicor-lane

I've liked you better when Katsa's around," Giddon said. "She's so rotton to me that you seem positively pleasant in contrast ↗

— Kristin Cashore

#giddon #katsa #kristin-cashore #po #positivity

Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race - of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance - of substituting peace for war - freedom for bondage - religion for superstition - the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#goals-in-life #freedom

First we form habits, then they form us. ↗

— Mark Matteson

#advice #habits #realization #us #what-forms-us