#fe

The best self help book I've ever read was, The little Engine that Could. ↗

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

#life

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#buddhism #eastern-religion #indochina #monotheism #rebirth-buddhism

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#life #life

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. ↗

— Werner Heisenberg

#science #life

I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

#saints #spirit #spiritual-life #unregenerate #worth

Try now, try now, it isn't too late' ... Excitement, like hysteria, bubbled up in me from a hundred unsealed springs. If it isn't too late, I thought confusedly, neither it is too early: I haven't much time left to spoil. It was the last flicker of instinct of self-preservation which had failed me so signally at Brandham Hall. ↗

— L.P. Hartley

#taking-chances #life

A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#life

Becky . . .” Luke looks at me carefully. “Have you ever been on a horse in your life?” “Yes! Of course I have!” Once. When I was ten. And I fell off. But I probably wasn’t concentrating or something. “Just be careful, won’t you?” he says. “I’m not quite ready to become a widower. ↗

— Sophie Kinsella

#life

Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will." ... You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said. ... "Not everyone is. But we are. Okay? ↗

— Jennifer Egan

#living #survival #life

Looking at the children, she knew that any hope for a new life would have to grow within her. She glanced at Nate, wondering if he felt as she did, that children were the only consolation in this world, the only recompense for so much suffering. ↗

— Laura Brodie

#pregnancy #life