#insight

She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle. ↗

— Banana Yoshimoto

#life

There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates. ↗

— David Menadue

#life

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away. ↗

— Nancy Mitford

#love

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#despair #ignorance #insight #loneliness #love

Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#fantasy #insight #love #nature #personality

If you talked to your friends the way you talk to your body, you’d have no friends left at all. ↗

— Marcia Hutchinson

#motivational #self-esteem #self-help #self-improvement #motivational

Chance favors the connected mind. ↗

— Steven Johnson

#innovation #insightful #internet #nature

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#morality #nature

It’s true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow." "Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight." "That’s not insight. That’s a personal guarantee. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#failure-is-not-an-option #guarantee #guarantees #human-sacrifice #insight

Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#practise-vs-preach #insight