#com

Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus. Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt. ↗

— Peter J. Carroll

#commentary #magic #imagination

Mostly I think I've learned to trust God more. I mean, if I start getting worried or freaked, I just try to put it in God's hands. Sometimes I imagine God cradling the globe in his hands, and I tell myself that as long as I'm with God, the Creator of the universe, I can be comfortable and at home anyplace on the planet. ↗

— Melody Carlson

#globe #trust #universe #worried #imagination

Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven. ↗

— Francis Beaumont

#companions #earth #faith #fly #heaven

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins. ↗

— Yann Martel

#empathy #imagination

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid: humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#imagination

All around me new love and it makes me sad. All around me feel assured that you'll be back, if I imagine you, body next to another. ↗

— Tegan Quin

#new-love #please-come-back #sainthood #sara-quin #sheets

He surprised me by his familiarity with details of movements and battles which I did not suppose had come to his knowledge. As he kept me talking for over half an hour, I flattered myself that what I had to say interested him. ↗

— Henry Villard

#come #details #did #familiarity #flattered

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. ↗

— Leonardo da Vinci

#first #last #passed #present #present time

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. ↗

— Joan D. Vinge

#beyond #both #climb #compelled #enjoy

He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone. Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed. ... ↗

— Adolfo Bioy Casares

#life #communication