#ends

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. ↗

— Aldo Leopold

#community #integrity #otherwise #preserve #right

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#history #legends #on-fiction #nature

I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the report of it reach me. Therefore I have made many enemies and few friends; for the public know nothing of well-wishers, and keep a wary eye on those who would reform them. ↗

— William Hazlitt

#enemies #friends #good-nature #injustice #lies

It sucks enough when girlfriends break plans with each other for a boy, but at least that’s not against the natural order of things, like when a boy blows off his girlfriend for friends. . . . Or maybe I’ve had it wrong all along. Since friendships usually outlast relationships, why shouldn’t friends receive preferential treatment? Because you don’t sleep with your friends! ↗

— Daria Snadowsky

#relationships #sex #friendship

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#friends #friendship #life #proust-questionnaire #rushdie

I hear he liked flowers pretty well." "Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him." --"Out, Brief Candle ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#disappointment #flowers #friends #nature #nature

...the story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life. ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#fate #friendship #illness #life #loneliness

Together we shared a bond not even death would violate. ↗

— Dee Remy

#family #friendship #love #lovers #loyalty

There is a third quality to friendship, and it is not as easy to put into a single word. The right word, literally, is "sympathy" - sym-pathos, common passion. This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#friendship #passion #relationship

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#life #love #romance #death