#civilization

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. ↗

— Anthony Marra

#existance #humanity #life #self #wolves

The life of the arts... is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#quality-of-life #test #the-arts #art

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs? ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#shakespeare #men

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves. ↗

— Jerry Spinelli

#life #nonconformity #sleep #life

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#nature #nature

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose. ↗

— Dag Hammarskjöld

#humans #nature #nature

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#behavior #bible #civilization #describes #god

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer? ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#fight-for #live-for #religion #sun #music

I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me... ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#flowers

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#civilization