#gh

Between death and hell a bridge shining silver wings offers his soul hope. ↗

— Aberjhani

#angels-and-demons #bridges #death #depression #desperation

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#independent-thought #reading #independence

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#duty #independent-thought #independence

I feel a sense of responsibility," said Jordan. "And where is this feeling located? In your pants, perhaps? ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#isabelle-lightwood #jordan-kyle #responsibility

You see, but you do not observe. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#observation

Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict’s uniform. ↗

— John Marsden

#perception

Money is the great tool through whose means labor and skill become universally co-operative. ↗

— Leland Stanford

#co-operative #great #labor #means #money

Women are only children of a larger growth. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters. ↗

— Philip Stanhope

#child #children #consults #does #flatters

But when you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow. ↗

— George Carlin

#growth #idea #laugh #path #zen

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ↗

— M. John Harrison

#greed #human-nature #thought #dreams