#ge

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people. ↗

— Isaac Newton

#ignorance #knowledge #wisdom #nature

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality. ↗

— Robert McKee

#art #awareness #chaos #confusion #emotion

Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount. ↗

— Clare Boothe Luce

#courage

‎Halt looked up at the trees above him. "Why does this boy ask so many questions?" he asked the trees. Naturally, they didn't answer. ↗

— John Flanagan

#questions #rangers #will #nature

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#nature #page- #nature

And now I know it is perfectly natural for me not to look at someone when I talk. Those of us with Asperger's are just not comfortable doing it. In fact, I don'treally understand why it's considered normal to stare at someone's eyeballs. ↗

— John Elder Robison

#nature

There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#human-nature #savagery #war #nature

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#garden #halfway #meet #might #nature

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end. The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father. Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#humor #change

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#georgina #kincaid #mead #richelle #succubus