#end

To seek greatness is the only righteous vengeance. ↗

— Criss Jami

#envious #envy #excellence #greatness #jealous

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#dignity #empowerment #envy #feminism #gender

Jesus said several times, “Come, follow me.” His was a program of “do what I do,” rather than “do what I say.” His innate brilliance would have permitted him to put on a dazzling display, but that would have left his followers far behind. He walked and worked with those he was to serve. His was not a long-distance leadership. He was not afraid of close friendships; he was not afraid that proximity to him would disappoint his followers. The leaven of true leadership cannot lift others unless we are with and serve those to be led. ↗

— Spencer W. Kimball

#lds #leadership #friendship

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#ender #ender-wiggin #life-lessons #life

it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#loss #life

Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn't foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered. ↗

— Nicholas Sparks

#life #possibility #regrets #what-if #life

You cannot fulfil God's purposes for your life while focusing on your own plans. ↗

— Rick Warren

#surrender #life

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. ↗

— Graham Greene

#beginning #creative-process #end #storytelling #writing

Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is, because you know people who have similar experiences. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#inspirational #lemony-snicket #experience

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#god #love #poverty #presence #spiritual-poverty