#diction

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one... ↗

— Cathryn Kemp

#addiction #addicts #brave #courage #difficult-life

If you look up the definition of greatness in the dictionary, it will say Michael Jordan. ↗

— Elgin Baylor

#dictionary #greatness #jordan #look #michael

Coffee and smoking are the last great addictions. ↗

— Lara Flynn Boyle

#coffee #great #last #smoking

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#correcting #correction #criticism #inspirational #dreams

here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail. ↗

— Thomas de Quincey

#drugs #age

I ended up going into this big art historical argument.' [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. 'It’s because he’s the man of sorrows,' Blinderman argued. 'He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction. ↗

— Cynthia Carr

#drugs #jesus #art

I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with. ↗

— Garry Trudeau

#contradictions #i #live #most #people

For him that stealeth,or borroweth and returneth not,this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever. Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#library #malediction #change

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual. ↗

— Earl Warren

#computers #e-mail #individuality #internet #prediction

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. ↗

— Nate Silver

#knowledge #prediction #self-knowledge #uncertainty #wisdom