#er

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns. ↗

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

#power #savagery #art

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#courage #destiny #empowerment #responsibility #self-control

Begin. . . where you are, NOT where you want to be. Begin stuck in the doldrums of your false story--if that is where you are. Begin there because, in truth, there is no other place to start from. Tell yourself that you are going to listen for the sound of your own voice--and remind yourself when you forget. And you will forget, over and over again. ↗

— Florence Falk

#art #clarity #lifestyle #living #loneliness

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#art #emotion #feeling #interpret #interpretation

You are altogether beautiful, my darling,  And there is no blemish in you. ~Song of Solomon 4:7 ↗

— Anonymous

#bible-verse #nasb #beauty

I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#as-i-lay-dying #great-gatsby #humor #mark-twain #tom-sawyer

A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. ↗

— Hugh Downs

#certain #circumstances #happy #happy person #person

My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength. ↗

— Michael Jordan

#i #into #me #perceived #push

Life is a bowl of cherries. Some cherries are rotten while others are good; its your job to throw out the rotten ones and forget about them while you enjoy eating the ones that are good! There are two kinds of people: those who choose to throw out the good cherries and wallow in all the rotten ones, and those who choose to throw out all the rotten ones and savor all the good ones. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#inspirational-life #inspirational-quotes #life #life-and-living #life-is-a-bowl-of-cherries

I am not a little bit of many things; but I am the sufficient representation of many things. I am not an incompletion of all these races; but I am a masterpiece of the prolific. I am an entirety, I am not a lack of anything; rather I am a whole of many things. God did not see it needful to make me generic. He thinks I am better than that. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#inspirational-attitude #inspirational-life #inspirational-quotes #interracial #mixed-race