#ge

We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way. ↗

— Kate Wicker

#eating-disorder #god #longing #looks #perfection

Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#beauty

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story. ↗

— Michael Connelly

#deception #los-angeles #make-believe #smog #southern-california

For one of the first pressures that bear down on American girls is the pressure not only to be liked but to be like everyone else. This initial feat of self-transformation often involves loosening one's grip on that quiet sense of inner self and hitching one's wagon to a single standard of beauty. The stress of leaping through that hoop insinuates itself into the young heart and soul with a vengeance, and insecurities go from being hard little buds of confusion to overripe, snarled and tyrannical fruits that hang on the vine as we age. ↗

— Debra Ollivier

#insecurity #women #age

I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first. ↗

— Myles Horton

#love #radicalism #change

Now I've been criticized for advocating that people push their boundaries because sometimes people get caught. Sometimes people get fired. Sometimes people lose their jobs because of pushing the boundaries too far, but it's an interesting experience. They found they didn't want to stay within those limitations that they were pushing. Once people find they can survive outside the limits, they're much happier. They don't want to feel trapped. So I think we can urge people to push the boundaries as far as they can, and if they get in trouble, fine; that's not too bad if that's what they want to do. ↗

— Myles Horton

#challenging #democracy #forward #progress #pushing

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. ↗

— John Buchan

#literature #change

You probably never realized this, but God wants to partner with us so that we can establish his kingdom here on earth. Have you heard of the universal principal of receiving? This principal is simply that in order to receive, you have to share. According to the Jewish tradition, an act of charity has the ability to change even a negative heavenly decree. Charity is not just meant to improve the world and those around you. It may surprise you to learn that it mostly serves to improve ourselves. ↗

— Celso Cukierkorn

#money #change

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. ↗

— Margaret Heffernan

#change

«Brixie’s blog was huge. That had to be it. Brixie had a monster fashion blog. All those Los Angeles girls with their feet on the pedals of daddy’s sports car... Speedometers twitched in Milan whenever those girls changed their shoes... And Brixie knew how to make the girls in L.A. change their shoes. Dr. Gustav Y. Svante had warned him about this. This was an Internet thing: “disintermediation.”» ↗

— Bruce Sterling

#disintermediation #fashion-blog #change