#insp

On Living Living is no laughing matter: You must take it seriously. So much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people – even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, most beautiful thing. I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees – and not for your children, either, but because, although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier. ↗

— Nâzım Hikmet

#poetry #beauty

If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily "ours" but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinguish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes. ↗

— Elisabeth Elliot

#inspirational #death

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#inspirational

Strength is Life, Weakness is Death. Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death. Love is Life, Hatred is Death. ↗

— Swami Vivekananda

#death

Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. ↗

— H. Jackson Brown Jr.

#life #death

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#inspirational #joy #purpose #death

Death ends a life, not a relationship ↗

— Morrie Schwartz

#death

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#essays #humor #inspirational #nature-writing #weasels

I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was on of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive. ↗

— Harriet Tubman

#death

In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us. ↗

— Mark Rowlands

#defiance #heart #inspiring #learning #philosophy