#ions

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#rationalizations #unsourced #nature

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice. ↗

— Marquis de Sade

#nature #passions #nature

No man stops caring as long as he breathes. As long as he has a mind and memory, he will care. This is what separates us from the animals. We have feelings. ↗

— F. Sionil José

#feelings #human-nature #nature

There are very few of us who remember the day, the moment, when our childhood ends. For most of us, the sun sets on our innocence gradually, sliding down over the western horizon like a toboggan run down over a long, steep slope. We are never really conscious of the moment we reach the bottom of the slope; we just know that one day we wake up and the toboggan ride is over. ↗

— Jennifer Wixson

#personal-growth #reflections #nature

Like many other who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d’Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#love

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception. ↗

— Mortimer J. Adler

#limitations #mysteries #wisdom #self-knowledge

In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought; for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it. ↗

— René Descartes

#infinity #limitations #reason #thought #nature

He doesn't need to be reminded you're great. ↗

— Greg Behrendt

#self-worth #self-worth

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#glory #humanity #loyalty #nations #nature

There is only one hopeful suggestion that I can give you: By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an inventor of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner--check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#existence #philosophy #nature