#form

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year. ↗

— David Brooks

#affection #connections #consciousness #happiness #information

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#philosophy #run-on-sentence-award #equality

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#form-of-address #formality #london #madam #miss

I have this desire to have this immaculate form of love that really doesn't exist, so my obsession goes on through life and I never find it and I end up miserable. But it makes me a better writer. ↗

— Angel Haze

#desire #end #exist #find #form

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it? ↗

— Robert Buettner

#conformity #grand-picture #human-behavior #human-superiority #humankind

Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak. ↗

— Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati

#personal-transformation #quiet-mind #self-help #soul #spiritual-life

Christians should be cultural and intellectual thermostats, exulting in opposition, iconoclasm,and balancing insights. ↗

— Gene Edward Veith Jr.

#distinction #love

Only the holy spirit, the spirit of the lord, can transform us. ↗

— Joseph Prince

#holy spirit #lord #only #spirit #transform

The proof is in the pudding when they come home. Will we have the data about their health, will we know where they were stationed, what their unit deployments were? I will need that information. ↗

— Anthony Principi

#come #data #deployments #health #home

What do you do with what you're given, and how do you transform it into something worthwhile? ↗

— Donald Fagen

#how #into #something #transform #worthwhile