#gr

As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a 'brotherhood of suffering between everything alive' would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next — as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet. ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#depression #progress #suffering #life

Honestly, I’ve never felt better in my life. It’s like somebody flicked a switch and I’ve suddenly realized how crazy I’d been acting all those years. All that talk about interfacing with an ultra-dimensional Phoenix deity – it was absolutely insane. ↗

— Mark Millar

#life

Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#music #life

So every single day, I found something to be grateful for and that's a powerful lesson. ↗

— Alice Barrett

#day #every #every single day #found #grateful

Opportunities are rare in this life, and fairness, rarer still. So, when you discover a fair opportunity, go after as if it were your last because it very well might be. ↗

— Joel T. McGrath

#regret #life

Our lives say much more about how we think than our books do. The theories we preach are not always the ones we actually believe. The theories we live are the ones we really believe. ↗

— R.C. Sproul

#integrity #life #life

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky. ↗

— Anita Shreve

#flight #gravity #heart #life #physics

He smiled understandingly-much more than understanding. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#life

So remember those who win the game Lose the love they sought to gain In debitures of quality and dubious integrity Their small-town eyes will gape at you In dull surprise when payment due Exceeds accounts received at seventeen ↗

— Janis Ian

#life #loneliness #maturity #popularity #youth

I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#honesty #integrity #secularism #life