#elf

The ultimate goal of writing is forgiveness. ↗

— Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#goal #self-improvement #ultimate #writing #forgiveness

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. ↗

— Bob Marley

#independent-thought #self-reliance #song-lyrics #freedom

You said you knew the perfect place to run to. A place that was empty of people, and buildings, and far, far away. A place covered in blood-red earth and sleeping life. A place longing to come alive again. It's a place for disappearing, you'd said, a place for getting lost... and for getting found. I'll take you there, you'd said. And I could say that I agreed. ↗

— Lucy Christopher

#finding-yourself #freedom #hope #living-life-to-the-fullest #running-away

An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy. ↗

— Christopher Isherwood

#desert #empowerment #environment #freedom #happiness

If [God] send me no husband, for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening ... ↗

— William Shakespeare

#blessings #empowerment #freedom #happiness #husbands

We are not supposed to all be the same, feel the same, think the same, and believe the same. The key to continued expansion of our Universe lies in diversity, not in conformity and coercion. Conventionality is the death of creation. ↗

— Anthon St. Maarten

#conformity #conventionality #creation #diversity #expansion

When we try to control, we become controlled; when we release, we become free. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#justice #self-control #freedom

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#sympathy #beauty

[Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#freedom

Spiritual yearning is the homesickness of the soul. ↗

— Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati

#meditation #self-help #soul #spiritual-hunger #spirituality