#in

Don't let the walls fall down and crash your dreams. Build more walls up as you succeed. ↗

— Laci Midgley

#dreams

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God. ↗

— John Green

#faith

Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow. ↗

— Tony Schwartz

#certainty #curiosity #growing #learning #letting-go

...set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#challenge

Whoa," said Nico as he climbed off the bus. "Is that a climbing wall?" "Yeah," I (Percy) said. "Why is there lava pouring down it?" "Little extra challenge..." - Percy ↗

— Rick Riordan

#climbing-wall #lava #nico-di-angelo #percy-jackson #percy-jackson-and-the-olympians

To me, a witch is a woman that is capable of letting her intuition take hold of her actions, that communes with her environment, that isn't afraid of facing challenges. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#challenge #commune #environment #intuition #witch

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#fate #universe

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#universe

The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#unhappiness #universe

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#feminism #life #maleness #modernity #philosophy