#cons

A true artist willingly removes their heart, allows constructive criticism to stomp it, then puts it back--bruised and aching--to continue improving due to the all-consuming obsessive love for their art. ↗

— H.G. Mewis

#h-g-mewis #true-artist #art

I knew that before I asked . . . but part of me can’t help hoping that maybe this time, he’ll love me.” “As I can’t help hoping that my mother will rise, and will once again be the woman who sang me such lullabies that the world stood still.” Pulling her into a crushing embrace, he pressed his lips to her temple. “We are both fools. ↗

— Nalini Singh

#love

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#government #money #money

Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies. ↗

— John Donne

#inconstancy #instability #love #passage-of-time #precariousness

Women are only children of a larger growth. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters. ↗

— Philip Stanhope

#child #children #consults #does #flatters

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#conspiracy #freemasonry #illuminati #anarchism

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going. ↗

— Herman E. Daly

#consumerism #desire #economics #nature

We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches. ↗

— Yasmine Galenorn

#consciousness #human-nature #interconnection #nature

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence! ↗

— Michael Denton

#coincidence #consensus #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. ↗

— Rumi

#consolation #grief #loss #reincarnation #loss