#ect

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning. ↗

— George MacDonald

#mirror #reflection #truth #life

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. ↗

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

#letting #reject #struggle #to #want

We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing. ↗

— Seneca

#how #never #nothing #pleasant #reflect

Was my life going to go on like this forever, totally uneventful? Alternating between unfulfilled expectations and expected disappointments? ↗

— Eva Heller

#expectation #life #life

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life. ↗

— Seneca

#am #choose #death #depart #go

With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue. ↗

— Nassau William Senior

#attention #been #complaint #confine #consideration

Fluorine has a protecting action against caries, but this is a local effect. If you drink it, you are running the risk of all kinds of toxic actions. ↗

— Arvid Carlsson

#actions #against #drink #effect #kinds

Well, in pharmacology, if the effect is local, it's of course absolutely awkward to use it in any other way than as a local treatment. ↗

— Arvid Carlsson

#any #awkward #course #effect #local

The real power of effective leadership is maximizing other people’s potential which inevitably demands also ensuring that they get the credit. When our ego won’t let us build another person up, when everything has to build us up, then the effectiveness of the organization reverts to depending instead on how good we are in the technical aspects of what we do. And we have stopped leading and inspiring others to great heights. ↗

— John Dickson

#ego #inspiring #leadership #potential #inspirational

What was I supposed to do then I wondered. Was there even a supposed-to for this kind of situation? A situation when when I looked at my receding past everything seemed retrospectively marked by an extreme order and predictability yet all moments since seemed to obey, and promised to continue obeying, their own set of stochastic, undisclosed, and undiscoverable laws. Where I was fully aware of the pitfalls and folly of a finely-tuned narcissism but still the known universe seemed to bend and bend inexorably inward and towards me where it awaited my next move, supremely ready to react accordingly. And how I knew that decisions I would soon make or defer would have near-Sophoclean import and yet nonetheless it all seemed oddly irrelevant. ↗

— Sergio De La Pava

#future #life #past #retrospective #uncertainly